Elon Musk’s social media loss has — so far — not been Mark Zuckerberg’s gain.
Following the election of Donald Trump earlier this month, users began fleeing X, the social media platform owned by the Trump-supporting Musk.
But as the Financial Times (FT) reported Saturday (Nov. 23), the biggest beneficiary of that exodus isn’t the Meta-owned Threads — conceived as an alternative to Twitter before its name change to X — but rather the upstart social platform Bluesky.
Since election day, usage of Bluesky’s app in the U.S. and Great Britain jumped by nearly 300% to 3.5 million daily users, the FT said, citing data from Similarweb. This influx was driven by academics, journalists and left-leaning politicians leaving X.
Before the election, Threads had five times the number of daily U.S. users as Bluesky, but that number has since shrunk, with Threads now just 1.5 times larger than Bluesky.
As the FT notes, Bluesky’s growth comes after Meta CEO Zuckerberg chose to scale back the prominence of political content across its apps, which also include Facebook and Instagram.
It was a move widely viewed as an attempt to stay out of politics and avoid being involved in free speech debates. And while Trump had once labeled Meta “an enemy of the people” and threatened Zuckerberg with imprisonment, he has since said he liked Zuckerberg “much better now” because he was “staying out of the election.”
Bluesky was initially funded by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. The platform had been invite-only until earlier this year, and jumped in popularity when that requirement was dropped.
While Bluesky had been in development long before Musk began his bid to purchase the platform once known as Twitter, the site happened to launch as the billionaire rolled out a series of unpopular changes on X.
When Bluesky began accepting members, it began to be viewed as a Twitter alternative, like Threads and Mastodon before it. But in the case of Bluesky, users aren’t subject to the whims of an algorithm, as PYMNTS wrote in a 2023 report on the advent of text-based social media platforms.
Meanwhile, this month saw a report from The Information that Meta was planning to add advertising to Threads, an initiative being led by the company’s Instagram team, with a small number of companies set to begin advertising in January.
Reached for comment by PYMNTS, a spokesperson for Meta said: “Since our priority is to build consumer value first and foremost, there are no ads or monetization features currently on Threads.”
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