‘X doesn’t offer me anything anymore’: Trump’s win triggers mass exodus to other platforms

Donald Trump’s return to the White House has been the tipping point for many X users. The platform’s owner, Elon Musk, put the social network at the service of the Republican, donated millions of dollars to the Trump campaign and even appeared at several rallies. In response, major media outlets like The Guardian and La Vanguardia have withdrawn from the platform, with numerous individuals following suit.

Although it’s still too early to measure the full impact of Trump’s victory on X’s user base — partly because the platform no longer discloses such data — it seems that the platform is facing significant defections. But it is clear that Bluesky, a social network created by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, is benefiting from this shift. In just one week, Bluesky gained over a million new users, bringing its total to 15 million. While it still lags behind Meta’s Threads (275 million users) and X itself (550 million), Bluesky has become the most downloaded app in the U.S. The platform’s growth is staggering, with reports of 600 to 800 new registrations per minute, most of them from Americans — figures that have never been seen before on the platform.

Scriptwriter and cartoonist Manuel Bartual is one of the people who are migrating to Bluesky. His case is representative because, as he himself admits, it was on the old Twitter where he achieved one of his greatest professional successes for a 2017 thread that captured widespread attention. “I haven’t closed my X account, but now I spend much more time on Bluesky than there. It’s where I see more movement, where my content generates more interactions,” he explains. Bartual has experimented with publishing the same content on both X and Bluesky, and the results have been striking: despite having over 250,000 followers on X and just 7,000 on Bluesky, his posts have a greater impact on the latter.

For Bartual, the decision to migrate to Bluesky has been a gradual process driven more by practicality than principle. “We’ve all seen what X has become lately,” he reflects. “The entertainment is still there, as long as you use the list hack [which allows users to view content in chronological order from selected accounts]. But the level of misinformation on Twitter is particularly worrying to me.”

This concern became especially evident during the flash flooding disaster in the Spanish region of Valencia. “For a few hours, X was useful, but very quickly it turned into a platform for spreading lies and fake news,” says Bartual.

Paloma Llaneza, a lawyer who had been an active member of X for years, recently decided to leave the platform, though she has kept her account open to prevent it from being cybersquatted. For Llaneza, the decline of X was evident over time, but Trump’s victory became the final straw. “Being on a social network 100% owned by an absolutely despicable guy who has supported Donald Trump, who is even more despicable and will bring about something like The Handmaid’s Tale in the U.S., is something I can no longer allow myself,” she explains.

Her decision is final, even if X were to change ownership in the future. “The Indian bots copying solidarity tweets for the Valencian community was the height of nonsense. It’s proof that the toxicity on X is so extreme, I think it’s beyond recovery,” she says. Llaneza has since moved to Bluesky, where she feels the toxicity is much more controlled, and the platform’s algorithm is less influential. “The journalists, disseminators, and other people I’m interested in are already on Bluesky, so X no longer offers me anything,” she adds.

For Llaneza, Bluesky represents what she loved about the early days of Twitter before Musk’s acquisition, when the platform felt more authentic and user-driven. This sentiment is shared by Bartual, who also fondly remembers the days, “when you could talk to friends, and it was easy to get informed and entertained.”

Guillermo Zapata, another writer and scriptwriter, shares a similar experience. He only returns to X now to retweet and encourage others to join Bluesky. “I left because I could no longer read who I wanted to read, nor could anyone who wanted to read me. I was seeing things that didn’t interest me, that I didn’t choose to see, and it irritated me,” he says, explaining his own departure from the platform.

Zapata, who has been using Bluesky for months, has observed several surges in new users, one of which came when Brazil temporarily suspended X for refusing to comply with a judge’s order to block profiles inciting hatred. Another spike occurred this summer, when Musk’s actions exacerbated racist riots in the U.K. The U.S. election campaign, during which Musk turned X into a platform amplifying Trumpism, also led to increased movement toward Bluesky. November 5 marked yet another notable uptick in Bluesky user registrations.

Echo chamber

A question that emerges from Bluesky’s sudden growth is whether users are seeking an ideological echo chamber. Are the people leaving X, or using it less, looking for a platform that aligns with their views? In other words, are users who disagree with the far-right content on X migrating to a more ideologically homogeneous environment? A parallel could be drawn to the period after Twitter expelled Trump following the Capitol insurrection, when many migrated to platforms like Parler or Truth Social to avoid what they saw as censorship and “woke” backlash.

Carmela Ríos, an expert in social networks and disinformation, believes X is increasingly becoming a niche network where people who do not agree with the prevailing ideology feel excluded. “There is no longer a party for those who do not align with the prevailing ideology,” Ríos explains. However, without concrete data, it’s difficult to confirm whether ideological factors are driving the user exodus.

What is more apparent, she notes, is a generational shift. Young people, in particular, are becoming more interested in privacy and less in public exposure. “Many young users are leaving big platforms or setting up their accounts so that they are not visible to everyone,” says Ríos. “For example, on Instagram, there are many private accounts.”

This shift, according to Ríos, suggests that social media users, especially younger ones, are gravitating towards spaces that offer more direct, community-driven interactions. “Young people don’t need to be in a large public forum like older people do: they are comfortable in more closed spaces. That’s why I think social networks that reproduce these relationships on a more human scale can succeed,” says the expert. “Bluesky is very similar to X, but it has many features that allow you to reduce the visibility of your activity. People want to talk to their community.”

X, in its current form, no longer meets that need. Musk’s $44 billion investment to acquire Twitter raised eyebrows at the time, but makes more sense following the U.S. presidential election. Musk used the platform to push his preferred candidate into the White House, and speculation now abounds that X could eventually merge with Truth Social, the platform Trump founded after being banned from Twitter. “Musk has now moved to another screen,” says Ríos. “It seems that Musk has transformed X into a tool of global governance, a spokesperson for a way of governing and looking at the world. We will see what happens in the coming months.”

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