US election results push social media users from X to Bluesky

When Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, he went on to rebrand the platform as X, fire hundreds of staff and trigger a wave of celebrity exits.

Fast-forward two years and elements of history are repeating themselves. Trump is back in power, and while there has been a steady trickle of X departures since 2022, another mass exodus is underway.

Some users may be quitting social media outright, but others are on the hunt for alternatives, driving up membership and engagement on platforms like Bluesky, Mastodon, Meta’s Threads, and Reddit. The platform’s COO Rose Wang stated that Bluesky had gained 700,000 new users in the week after the US election, in an interview with the Verge.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic politician who serves as the US representative for New York’s 14th congressional district, is one of the politicians who decided to make her Bluesky comeback.

“Should I tell Twitter I’m here?”

“I don’t even know why I stopped using this in the first place? Good GOD it’s nice to be in a digital space with other real human beings,” she posted on Monday. AOC joined the platform last April, but has not been active since July.  

“Should I tell Twitter I’m here? I don’t want to inadvertently cause an influx of all the worst accounts on the internet,” she went on to state in another post.

It is not just politicians ditching the platform though, with Swifties also reportedly heading to Bluesky. According to a number of surveys, more than 60% of X users are men, which could also be driving this Swiftie exit.

Taylor Swift may have an X account, but she has not posted any content on it since 15 October. Siding with Kamala Harris, she signed off her Presidential candidate endorsement with “Childless Cat Lady“, referring to comments made by Vice President elect JD Vance in a 2021 interview.

Musk quickly responded to the bait, responding “Fine Taylor … you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life” on 11 September.

However, it is not only US individuals and organisations that are scrapping X, with users across the pond also posting farewell messages from their accounts. For instance, the Berlin Film Festival, branded as one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals, announced on Monday that it would no longer be on X from 15 December.

What is Bluesky?

Bluesky hit the 14.5 million user mark in November, numbers which have been driven up by the US election results. The post-election influx is believed to come mainly from Britain and North America, a huge overall increase from the nine million user mark which Bluesky reached in September.

However, US politics are not the sole driving force in pushing up the platforms’ memberships, with the company reportedly gaining 3 million new users in the week after X was suspended in Brazil in September.

Bluesky was initially launched within Twitter, as an internal team tasked with developing an open source infrastructure on which the entire platform could shift. By 2022 the situation had changed, and Bluesky became its own independent team.

Bluesky is now owned by CEO Jay Graber, however Jack Dorsey was Bluesky’s CEO when the platform broke from Twitter. Although Dorsey labelled Musk the “singular solution I trust” for the future of Twitter in 2022, he shifted his tone a year later when he criticised Musk for his “fairly reckless” moves after taking control of the site.

What’s the problem with X?

Elon Musk is an ever-increasingly close ally of Donald Trump’s. Trump has stated that he wants to appoint Musk, the world’s richest man, as the country’s “secretary of cost-cutting”. Musk would hereby be tasked with reducing bureaucracy in the federal government by a third, as part of what Trump wants to call the “Department of Government Efficiency”. 

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On election night, he sat only an arms-length away from Trump at the US President’s election night party in Mar-a-Lago.

Musk made his support of Trump public in July, hosting a two-hour audio interview with Trump on X in August. Anti-immigration policies were among the two men’s talking points, with Musk calling Trump the “path to prosperity”.

The Associated Press reports that Musk’s super political action committee spent around $200 million on supporting Trump’s reelection.

This political stance comes as Musk not only changed Twitter’s philosophy in 2022, pushing for “free speech”, but also allowing a shift in moderation guidelines to pave the way for hate speech.

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X has the largest proportion of disinformation out of six big social media networks (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, X, and YouTube), according to a study undertaken by disinformation startup Trustlab, on behalf of the European Commission. The research was carried out with a focus on Spain, Slovakia and Poland, three countries particularly prone to disinformation according to the EU.

Another report conducted by the Center for Countering Digital Hate identified 50 cases between January and July 2024, where Musk posted election claims which were subsequently debunked by independent fact-checkers. Despite this fact-checking, these posts continue to spread on the app.

While many users are leaving X for platforms like Bluesky, there are still many users who rely on the platform for information and communication. It doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere just yet.