Democrats flee X for Bluesky amid Musk-Trump alliance

Bluesky, an alternative social media platform to X, has experienced a large surge in users as Democrats, including a number of prominent figures on the left, announce their departure from the social media network owned by Elon Musk in the wake of the presidential election.

Nearly 1 million users have signed up for Bluesky each day over the past week as the social networking website thrives in the wake of a liberal exodus from X.

Many users either quitting X or deactivating their accounts cited a “toxic” or “disturbing” environment, in part blaming Musk’s leadership and promotion of certain political stances.

Trump’s election and Musk’s close alliance with the president-elect have intensified those concerns, repelling users who have grown uncomfortable or exhausted with the political climate on X.

“Twitter has always had its problems but over the last year or so, it has become a more toxic place, it certainly minimizes progressive voices, it has become a conservative ethosphere and I see that trend continuing,” Democratic strategist Roddell Mollineau told The Hill.

To be sure, Bluesky's size pales in comparison to X.

Musk's site reported has 588 million accounts, meaning the users who have left, including more than 115,000 U.S. web users who deactivated their accounts the day after Election Day, represent a small segment of its audience.

Bluesky’s total user base surged by more than 500 percent after the election, but still has just 21.5 million users as of Friday afternoon.

Instagram Threads, which might now be a stronger rival to X, has about 275 million active users, a company spokesperson confirmed.

Still, the Bluesky spike points to a new trend in social media of fragmenting themselves among different platforms.

Just as Americans increasingly read or watch traditional media with political perspectives that mirror their own, they are seeking out social media networks where they are more likely to be with people they agree with than who see things differently.

The changes to X are due to a combination of Musk’s scaled-back content moderation measures, Mollineau said, and putting “his thumb on the scale” when it comes to content. The platform’s algorithm has been repeatedly accused of favoring Musk’s posts, which are often about his right-leaning views and alliance with Trump.

“What I think has changed over the last 10 years...it used to be really two major platforms, Twitter and Facebook, and that sort of dominated the social media ecology,” said Erik Nisbet, the director of the Center for Communication and Public Policy at Northwestern.

“But we have moved to a much more fractured, much more diverse social media ecology, not only with the rise of TikTok [and] the rise of Instagram among younger people, these alt tech like Rumble as an alternative to YouTube, you have Gab...Discord.”

Bluesky spokesperson Emily Liu sought to differentiate the platform from X, stating Bluesky focuses on giving “control” to individual users on their online identity and experience.

To do this, Bluesky allows users to build “custom feeds” rather than a single, default “For You” page like X and TikTok have. Users can subscribe to over 50,000 different custom feeds, Liu told The Hill.

As for the timing of the postelection surge, “It just shows that users want a social network where we take trust and safety seriously,” Liu said.

The defections from X the day after the election were more than on any other day of Musk’s leadership, breaking the record set in December 2023 when 65,000 web users left the platform shortly after Musk restored conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to the platform.

Among the departing users were former cable news host Don Lemon, who cited a lack of a “honest debate” and author Stephen King, who told users to follow him on Meta’s Instagram Threads, another microblogging alternative.

X did not respond to a request for comment. Neither Musk nor X has discussed Bluesky publicly.

Billionaire investor Mark Cuban, who played a large role in the Harris campaign and has clashed with Musk online before, did not leave X fully but started consistently posting on Bluesky this month, writing in an introductory message, “Hello, less hateful world.”

Cuban told The Hill he likes Bluesky so far, calling it “a social network that actually allows you to be social.”

Apparently referencing Musk, Cuban said, “There isn’t one person driving an algorithm, influencing the tenor of the site. It is much more community driven.”

The exits have spurred conversations over X’s changing landscape under Musk.

Steven Livingston, the founding director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University, said that when Musk purchased Twitter for $43 billion, he suggested it would be a place for open discussion and that its then-leaders were a threat to the airing of contrarian ideas.

But under Musk, Livingston argued that X has become a “much more homogenous” platform, with parts of it serving as a “mouthpiece for the ‘Trumpian’ right.”

Musk has increasingly becomes intertwined with Trump’s inner circle, reportedly spending days at Mar-a-Lago and appearing alongside the president-elect at public events.

Trump tapped him to lead a new government efficiency panel, called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which is tasked with slashing unnecessary government spending and regulations.

Bluesky, like many social networks in early phases, experienced short bursts of new users in the past, but the post-election surge appears to be lasting longer, board member and Techdirt CEO Mike Masnick noted last week.

Asked if the recent uptick in Bluesky usage will last, Jonathan Bellack – the director of Harvard’s Applied Social Media Lab – said it is hard to predict but the sudden influx, especially by prominent figures, may have triggered the “network effect.”

“A lot more popular people...if they’re all somewhere else, suddenly the benefit of going somewhere else is better,” he told The Hill. “You’re not losing out as much and then you can really start to get a major shift where suddenly everybody goes.”

Bluesky’s emphasis on user choice is important and could be where the social media ecosystem is heading, Bellack said.

“If people start choosing platforms that are more open and more flexible, even if they don’t need to use that flexibility today, it means when the next thing comes along, there won’t be this feeling of having to use words like dominance or locked in and so forth,” he said. “People should be able to choose how they want to communicate and socialize with each other.”

Not everyone joining Bluesky is leaving X.

Cuban, the “Shark Tank” investor said he plans to stay on X and will sometimes create posts to see what the “signal-to-noise" ratio, noting “there isn’t much signal and there is still a ton of noise.”