Numbers of users migrating from X.com, formerly Twitter, to the new decentralised social media platform of Bluesky have soared since the US election.
The platform, which was partly set up by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey in 2022, said it has gained 700,000 new users in the week following Donald Trump’s victory, mostly from people in the US and UK.
Membership on Bluesky has jumped to 14.5 million, up from around 13 million in late October and nine million in September.
“We’re excited to welcome all of these new people, ranging from Swifties to wrestlers to city planners,” Bluesky spokesperson Emily Liu said.
Many users has already began to depart X in the weeks leading up to the election as owner Elon Musk gave his vocal and financial support to Trump.
X.com became a propaganda outlet for Trump and the Republicans during the campaign, no doubt many of the bots and sockputppet accounts operated from Russia, despite the Justice Department having said in the summer it had uncovered a 1,000-strrong propaganda network backed by Moscow.
The Musk-owned site was “flooded with bots, far-right content and hate speech”, Computer magazine reported, with changes also pushed through to the block functionality on X to support Musk’s “free speech absolutist” philosophy.
X also informed users that their data would be used to train AI models, starting from November 15, causing lots of new BlueSky to deleting their entire archives.
Bluesky was set by Dorsey as a decentralized part of Twitter in 2019 and became an independent company in 2022.
Former software engineer Jay Graber was chosen to lead Bluesky by Dorsey to become CEO in August 2021.
Bluesky has added features including direct messaging and video compatibility to provide a more seamless experience to other social media sites.
X rival Threads, set up by Facebook owner Meta Platforms, has also done well from users leaving X this year.
Launched last year, Threads reached 175 million monthly active users this summer, with boss Mark Zuckerberg announcing last month that the platform had grown to 275 million users.
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