From X to Bluesky: why are people fleeing Elon Musk’s ‘digital town square’?

A mass departure from Elon Musk’s X has led to the site losing about 2.7 million active Apple and Android users in the US in two months, with its rival social media platform Bluesky gaining nearly 2.5 million over the same period.

The exodus has coincided with the departure of prominent figures such as the filmmakers Guillermo del Toro and Mike Flanagan, and the actors Quinta Brunson and Mark Hamill. Others, such as the politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have maintained their X account but have begun posting more regularly on Bluesky.

According to the digital market intelligence company Similarweb, the number of daily active US users on X has dropped by 8.4% since early October, from 32.3 million to 29.6 million.

The number of Bluesky users has risen by 1,064%, from 254,500 to roughly 2.7 million since 6 October. The increase started slowly, but became more noticeable when Musk assumed control of the X handle @america to promote his Donald Trump-supporting Super Pac and began regularly posting in favour of the former and future president.

The flow increased further in the aftermath of Trump’s election win. Within a week of 5 November, Bluesky’s user total had doubled from 743,900 to 1.4 million. A week later it had doubled again to 2.8 million. In the 50 days after Musk’s formation of the Super Pac, X had gone from having nearly 127 times more active US users than Bluesky, to a little over 10 times as many.

Bruce Daisley, a former vice-president of the company in Europe, the Middle East and Africa when it was still known as Twitter, thinks the migration away from X is largely because the “digital town square” as Musk has called it has become a far less enjoyable place to be.

“If I went out to a Christmas market, and if in the corner of this Christmas market there was a group of racist protesters, I probably wouldn’t stay there,” Daisley said.

Daisley, who was once the most senior figure at the social media company outside the US, says that rightwing and leftwing politicians have always had a place on X, as long as they did not espouse violent or discriminatory beliefs. Under Musk, he feels that too much leeway is given to those with more radical views.

“There’s a lot of content being amplified that most reasonable people would question whether is worth amplifying”, he said, referring to Musk recently questioning the sentence given to the jailed far-right activist Tommy Robinson. “Tommy Robinson is not some benign debater. He’s someone who wants to weaponise racist narratives and racist rhetoric. Let him have his space, I just don’t want to be there.”

Salomé Saqué, a French journalist who had amassed 210,000 followers on X, abandoned the site and deactivated her account in a climate of harassment and misinformation without any moderation in place. She feels that since Musk’s acquisition, X “now feels structurally hostile to journalism and verified information”, and that as a journalist she “could no longer justify staying on a platform where the fundamental purpose of my work – sharing reliable information – was being undermined”.

Saqué has found alternative platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, where she has 380,000 and 67,000 followers respectively, but like many X-pats she has also started using Bluesky, on which she quickly gained 30,000 followers and which she feels is a more diverse and productive platform for sharing ideas and information.

Despite finding a space she perceives as healthier for journalism, she still feels that her departure and that of others like her has left a vacuum which “amplifies those who weaponise the platform for hate, propaganda, and manipulation”, and that the decline in diverse opinions on X “feels like a defeat for critical thinking, checked information and the democratic exchange of ideas”.

On 13 November the Guardian announced that it would no longer be posting content on X from its official accounts. The organisation said it considered the benefits of being on the platform were now outweighed by the negatives, citing the “often disturbing content” found on it.

Beyond celebrities and journalists, the most surprising departures from X have come from German football clubs. First Hamburg’s St Pauli left, calling X a “hate machine”, followed by Werder Bremen, which said that “with the recent radicalisation of the platform, a line had been crossed for the club”.

Its director of communications, Christoph Pieper, said X no longer aligned with the values the club strives to hold, and that reducing its visibility online was a price worth paying for its principles.

“We are leaving 600,000 followers on X for only 9,000 on Bluesky,” he said. “It can have economic consequences for us, because our partners have paid for a range that was significantly greater at X than it is now at Bluesky. But … we as a club have moral values. We fight against transphobia, homophobia, antisemitism, discrimination. For us a place where there is no regulation for hate speech is not the place to be.”

Pieper said the club was not sure if it has found a permanent home on Bluesky, but that it did not regret its decision: “Bluesky is currently the right choice for us, and other clubs are gradually switching to it. But we can’t yet say whether the platform will catch on. What is clear though is that X is the wrong one.”

Source: The Guardian