Users are fleeing X for rival Bluesky after Elon Musk helped re-elect Donald Trump

Hundreds of thousands of people have signed up to 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 have signed up for Bluesky, a site that aims to capture the freewheeling feel of Twitter before it became X — and was flooded with bots and vicious hate speech Guardian reported.

Musk was one of Trump’s biggest campaign supporters, investing an estimated $200 million in pro-Trump super PACs and leading the Republican presidential candidate’s field game in key battleground states.

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

Throughout the election, the platform’s algorithm appeared to push pro-Trump content while suppressing posts from liberal politicians and pundits. According to Reuters, Musk himself has created more than 85 inaccurate posts that have been viewed a total of two billion times.

Most of Bluesky’s new users come from North America and the UK Guardian reports, suggesting that people are fed up with X’s billionaire owner serving as Trump’s unofficial propaganda minister.

Despite the increase in 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 to Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, has more than 275 million users, while Trump’s Truth Social has just 2 million.

But as more people grow tired of billionaire-backed platforms, Bluesky has emerged as an alternative for people who want fewer angry posts, better moderation and more control over their feeds.

“No one is threatening me here and that makes me suspicious,” wrote one user with more than 15,000 followers.

This sentiment has recently inspired several prominent liberal users to take action on the site.

“Hello less hateful world,” Mark Cuban posted on Tuesday.

The website started as a project within Twitter and became an independent company in 2022. It is a nonprofit corporation largely owned by its chief executive, Jay Graber, and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey previously served on the board.

A quick look at the Bluesky homepage feed actually reminds you of the Twitter of yesteryear: 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 accidentally cause an influx of the worst accounts on the internet.”

Half an hour later she had decided: “I’ll wait now.”