As Musk shakes up Twitter, graphics show number of users and who's behind accounts

After buying Twitter for $44 billion, owner Elon Musk is reshaping the social media platform, including disbanding its board of directors, bringing in coding engineers from his other companies and planning a monthly fee for revamped Twitter Blue subscriptions that will replace the existing verification process.

The changes, actual and pending, would affect Twitter customers in the U.S. and across the globe.

Though Twitter is not the world’s largest platform, it has hundreds of millions of users and presents a significant amount of commentary on American politics. As the service unveils more operational changes, USA TODAY takes a moment to look at Twitter’s reach to calculate who will be affected.

More than 40 million Americans are active daily users

Twitter defines its users as monetizable Daily Active Users, or mDAUs, which it says are the Twitter accounts of individuals, organizations or other accounts that either logged in or were authenticated and accessed Twitter via twitter.com. This allowed Twitter to show the account ads and paid Twitter products.

About 23% of Americans have used Twitter

US Twitter users tend to be younger and male

More male than female users say they favor Twitter.

What do US users get from Twitter?

News and entertainment are top reasons, studies show.

Twitter users list benefits — and stress

How popular is Twitter compared with other platforms?

How US users rate Twitter's effect on democracy

Most Twitter content comes from one-fourth of its users

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SOURCE USA TODAY Network reporting and research; Pew Research; DataReportal.com; Twitter investor relations, quarterly reports