Users are fleeing Elon Musk’s X in greater numbers than ever before following the US election, with a competitor firming up as its replacement.

Bluesky, a Twitter clone founded by former CEO Jack Dorsey, now has more than 15 million users after opening to the public in February 2024, with over two million people joining the platform since Americans voted on November 5.

Dorsey left the Bluesky board in May, 2024.

hello and welcome to the 1M people that have joined Bluesky in the last week!!!

[image or embed]

— Bluesky (@bsky.app) November 13, 2024 at 6:39 AM

Dr Naomi Smith, a digital sociologist at the University of the the Sunshine Coast, said the internet was littered with dead social media sites and none were too big to fail.

“It’s interesting to see this happen to X; arguably it’s been leaking people for a while since Elon took over,” she said.

“His continued hijinks in both business and politics have just made it very unappealing for people to socialise on.”

Musk, who bought Twitter in October 2022 and rebranded it to X in July 2023, backed Donald Trump’s bid to return to the White House with millions of dollars and weaponised his platform to support the Republican president-elect.

On Tuesday, Trump named Musk to a key role in his new White House administration, sharing leadership of a department to cut government spending.

Smith said it “doesn’t take much for people to pack up and move elsewhere”.

“The reason why we haven’t seen it as much until this point is that there wasn’t really a collective consensus on where people were going to go,” she said.

“Spoutable was a competitor for a while, then we had Mastodon and a lot of different sites that people were migrating to, but it seems to me at this point that Bluesky is now the next destination.”

The migration has included a large swathe of people who formerly engaged and commented on Australian politics on Twitter, known as Auspol.

Why leave?

Simon Katterl, a mental health and human rights advocate, told The New Daily that he switched from X to Bluesky because he did not want to support Musk.

“We need spaces to develop deeper dialogue rather than a feral cesspit that X has become,” he said.

“It’s better here and my hope is that Australia’s political and mental health advocacy and policy can take place on Bluesky, rather than X.”

He said the US election “showed in part how corporate social media power is growing to influence our democracies”.

“Twitter used to be a space outside of the mainstream media environment, where we as citizens set the agenda,” Katterl said.

“It’s not that anymore so I’ve tried to go somewhere with better conditions for learning, dialogue and debate.”

Other Bluesky users said Musk’s artificial pushing of his own posts, changes to verification and “wall-to-wall hate, disinformation and enabling fascist trolls” contributed to their decision to leave the platform.

The Guardian also announced on Thursday that it would no longer post to X because of “the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism”.

X’s future

Musk’s governance of the ‘global town square’ has spurred advertisers to flee the platform due to its unbanning of white supremacist and Nazi accounts and a dwindling user base.

Elon Musk’s actions have been cited as major reasons for users fleeing X. Photo: Getty

In the past year, X has lost a third of all of its British-based users and a fifth of US-based users. A temporary ban in Brazil also sent Bluesky’s userbase in the country skyrocketing.

Smith said it could be difficult to leave a platform that has provided “joy, community and professional opportunities”.

“People are looking around X and thinking what I thought I had on here doesn’t exist anymore,” she said.

“The risk-benefit analysis when it comes to packing up and moving to a new platform suddenly seems a lot less risky and lot more beneficial.”

Bluesky gained 2.6 million users in the week after X was banned in Brazil in August – 85 per cent of them from Brazil, the company said. About 500,000 users signed up in just one day last month, when X signalled that blocked accounts would be able to see a user’s public posts.

In 2023, advertisers such as IBM, NBCUniversal and its parent company Comcast fled X over concerns about their ads showing up next to pro-Nazi content and hate speech on the site in general. Musk has also inflamed tensions with his own posts endorsing an antisemitic conspiracy theory.

-with AAP