X-ODUS

Users Flee X for Bluesky After Owner Elon Musk Powers Trump Election Win

With Elon Musk’s X steeped in election disinformation and Russian bots, liberal users appear to be switching to the platform’s upstart rival.

Hundreds of thousands of people have signed up for a rival social media platform after Elon Musk’s X helped propel Donald Trump to a second term in the White House.

In the week since the election, more than 700,000 new users signed up for Bluesky, a site that aims to capture the freewheeling feeling of Twitter back before it became X—and was over-run with bots and virulent hate speech, the Guardian reported.

Musk has been one of Trump’s biggest campaign supporters, pouring an estimated $200 million into pro-Trump super PACs and running the Republican presidential candidate’s ground game in key battleground states.

He’s also allowed X to become a cesspool of misinformation and Russian interference.

Throughout the election, the platform’s algorithm seemed to push pro-Trump content while burying posts from liberal politicians and pundits. Musk himself created more than 85 inaccurate posts that were viewed a collective 2 billion times, Reuters reported.

Most of Bluesky’s new users are from North America and the UK, the Guardian reported, suggesting that people are tired of X’s billionaire owner acting as Trump’s unofficial minister of propaganda.

Despite the surge on Bluesky, X still has far more users. The platform reports 250 million daily users and 550 million monthly visitors, compared to Bluesky’s 14.5 million global users. Threads, a competitor from Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, boasts more than 275 million users, while Trump’s Truth Social has a paltry 2 million.

But with more and more people fed up with billionaire-backed platforms, Bluesky has emerged as an alternative for people who want fewer rage posts, better moderation and more control over their feeds.

“No one is threatening me here, and it’s making me suspicious,” wrote one user with more than 15,000 followers.

That feeling has recently inspired several high-profile liberal users to become active on the site.

“Hello Less Hateful World,” Mark Cuban posted on Tuesday.

The site started as a project within Twitter and became an independent company in 2022. It’s a Public Benefit Corporation mostly owned by its chief executive, Jay Graber, and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey previously sat on the board.

A quick perusal of the Bluesky homepage feed does indeed feel like the Twitter of old: cat videos, dog memes, comics and election jokes instead of tirades.

“Should I tell Twitter I’m here?” New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted on Tuesday. “I don’t want to inadvertently cause an influx of all the worst accounts on the internet.”

Half an hour later, she’d decided: “I’m gonna wait for now.”

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Janna Brancolini

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