Users Flock To Bluesky Post Election, As Guardian Leaves X

The fallout from Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election continues, with more developments for the tech sector.

The Guardian news organisation for example announced that it will no longer post content on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, from its official accounts.

The newspaper said it considered the benefits of being on the platform (formerly Twitter) were now outweighed by the negatives, and it cited the “often disturbing content” found on it.

Guardian exit

Twitter has long been cited for its toxic content, but under the controversial ownership of Elon Musk, critics have argued it is increasingly featuring more far right content, hate speech and anti semitic content, that has driven both users and advertisers away from the platform.

The Guardian has become the latest to leave Elon Musk’s X.

It said it has more than 80 accounts on X, with approximately 27 million followers.

“We wanted to let readers know that we will no longer post on any official Guardian editorial accounts on the social media site X,” the Guardian said in an announcement to readers.

The Guardian said it had long-standing concerns about content on the platform, but the site’s coverage of the US presidential election had crystallised its decision.

“This is something we have been considering for a while given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism,” it said.

It added: “The US presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse.”

Musk and Trump

Elon Musk is one of Trump’s biggest supporters, donating more than $119m (£92m) to a Super PAC to re-elect him.

Musk also appeared at multiple campaign events with Trump, and has now been awarded with a leadership role to offer the White House “advice and guidance” to “drive large scale structural reform” (aka cost cutting) of the federal government.

The Guardian said X users would still be able to share its articles across the platform and that posts on X would occasionally be embedded in its work as part of its live news reporting.

Reporters would also be able to continue using the platform for news gathering purposes, the Guardian said.

The left-leaning Guardian is of course not a natural environment for the X platform, which has been increasingly associated with the far right stance of its owner.

“Social media can be an important tool for news organisations and help us to reach new audiences but, at this point, X now plays a diminished role in promoting our work. Our journalism is available and open to all on our website and we would prefer people to come to theguardian.com and support our work there,” said the Guardian.

One million Bluesky additions

Meanwhile rival platform Bluesky continues to benefit from fed up users retreating from X, with another surge after Trump’s election win.

In a post on Tuesday, Bluesky said it welcomed the 1 million people that have joined Bluesky in the last week.

Bluesky’s userbase has grown by four million in two months, and last month it had revealed it had gained 500,000 new users, after Elon Musk’s X said his ‘free speech platform’ would allow blocked users to still see posts.

Bluesky now has 14.7 million users in total, which means it is now the third largest micro-blogging type social media platform behind X and Meta’s Threads.

Meta’s Threads continues to expand and currently has 275 million monthly users.

This is still some distance away from X’s 586 million monthly active users – a total that has been steadily shrinking under Musk’s ownership.