X is experiencing the largest exodus of users since Musk took over

“The majority of new users in this influx are from the United States, followed by Canada and the United Kingdom,” a Bluesky representative told NBC News in an email. “We’re excited to welcome all these new people, from Swifties to wrestlers to city planners.”

A spokesman for

David Carr, Editor of News Insights and Research at Similarweb, provided NBC News with data confirming that X saw its highest traffic of the entire year during the presidential election. But the day after, November 6, X also recorded 115,414 account deactivations, the highest number since Musk took over the site, the investigation found.

Noëlle Polo, a 22-year-old Texan, came to Bluesky the evening after the election. When she woke up the morning after joining Bluesky, she said, “All the Swifties joined.” Polo is one of thousands of people who have Taylor Swift fan accounts, making up one of the largest fandoms. On November 6th, a notable exodus of Swifties from X landed on Bluesky, which prefers Polo Threads because it’s not linked to their Instagram account.

“I have a private personal account for friends and family and a public Taylor Swift account so no one gets lost in my Taylor Swift content,” Polo said. “Swifties have been looking for another app besides Twitter since Elon took over. It just wasn’t a healthy environment.”

Rory Mir, deputy director of community organizing at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, said, “X really teaches everyone how important it is who owns the websites we use and rely on to communicate online.”

“What people see with X is that it has subjectively lost value,” Mir continued. “People don’t feel like the right boxes are being heard or promoted on the site. In many cases they don’t feel safe using the website.”

For other X users who have used the platform to build an audience and create a community, the decision whether to stop posting or delete their account is not easy.

“From a human perspective, it is difficult to leave a technology that has been so helpful to my growth,” said José Vilson, an educator and best-selling author who currently posts on X, Threads and Bluesky. “I’ll probably post less, but I won’t delete the account unless it’s like you’re going to get in big trouble if you don’t.”

Laura Sell, marketing and social media manager at Duke University Press, said the nonprofit brand is working to build a following on Bluesky and Threads while continuing to stay and post on X, where she has more than 50,000 followers. Sell ​​said that both the publisher’s Bluesky and Threads accounts saw an increase in followers this week, with more on Bluesky, but they have not yet reached the size of X followers.

“It’s just so hard to leave,” she said. “I think we would be talking if something really egregious were to happen, and we would probably start hearing from our writers.”

For people who leave the platform, it is not clear what will happen to their accounts.

On Friday, Currently, X users can go to the site’s settings and log out.

Anyone who uses the site agrees that its content can be used to “train our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or otherwise,” the new agreement says.

This change may lead some to delete all of their posts or possibly their accounts entirely.

While there are several free services that automatically delete all posts from an account, the services NBC News reviewed either offer no guarantees against negative consequences, such as possible account suspension, or require some technical work. Some companies like TweetDelete and Circleboom offer automatic tweet deletion services for paying subscribers.

Micah Lee, a privacy advocate and developer and former director of information security at The Intercept, told NBC News that he is developing a new free service called Cyd for deleting posts from multiple platforms, including Public until next week.

“If you delete your account, someone else can use your username, buy a blue check and potentially impersonate you,” Mir said. “So that could be a reason to stick with that namespace and just stop using the site, especially if you’re a public, sort of public person.”

Dr. Jorge Caballero, a data scientist and public health communicator, said he has regularly reactivated his X account since leaving the platform in 2022 for this reason. But shortly after the election, he said he permanently deactivated his account.

“There is no point in keeping this username at this point,” Caballero said. He now uses Bluesky full time. “There are enough journalists, community leaders, advocates and science communicators necessary to actually create change and inform the public. So far it’s exactly right.”