Bluesky wins as users flee X-Mask after US election: what's going on
Kyiv • UNN
Social network Bluesky has recorded a significant increase in new users. This happened against the backdrop of an outflow of users from platform X (formerly Twitter) after the US presidential election. The platform has reached 14.5 million users.
Social network Bluesky has attracted more than 700 ,000 new users in the week after the US election, as users seek to avoid misinformation and offensive messages on X, The Guardian reports, according to UNN.
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The influx of new users, mainly from North America and the UK, helped Bluesky reach 14.5 million users worldwide, up from 9 million in September, the company said.
Social media researcher Axel Bruns said the platform offers an alternative to X, formerly Twitter, including a more effective system for blocking or suspending problem accounts and controlling harmful behavior.
"It's become a haven for people who want to have the same social media experience that Twitter used to provide, but without all the far-right activism, disinformation, hate speech, bots, and all the rest of it," he said.
"The more liberal Twitter community has now really fled from there and seems to have moved en masse to Bluesky," the researcher noted.
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Bluesky started as a project within Twitter but became an independent company in 2022 and is now largely owned by CEO Jay Graeber.
Previously, the platform benefited from the discontent with X and its billionaire owner Elon Musk, who is closely associated with the successful election campaign of US President-elect Donald Trump. Twitter has lost millions of users since rebranding to X, and US usage has fallen by more than one-fifth in seven months.
Bluesky reported attracting 3 million new users in the week after X was blocked in Brazil in September, and another 1.2 million in the two days after X announced that it would allow users to view messages from people who had blocked them.
"We're excited to welcome all these new people, from Swifties to wrestlers to city planners," said Bluesky spokesperson Emily Liu.
Bluesky is still second to Threads in the social networking category in Apple's US App Store, which reported reaching 275 million monthly active users in November, up from 200 million in August.
The independent platform is said to have recently added features including direct messaging and video compatibility to be more like X and differentiate itself from its Meta-owned competitor.
