On the day following the election, X saw its biggest user exodus since Elon Musk bought the platform in 2022. Users have since swarmed other social media apps, such as Instagram’s Threads and BlueSky.
Users and outlets, such as ex-CNN anchor Don Lemon and the Guardian, were some of the biggest accounts to close. More than a million people joined BlueSky last week, increasing its base to more than 15 million users. Instagram Threads currently has 275 million users but is trailing behind BlueSky as one of the top two trending social media apps on Apple’s app store.
Reasons for leaving X have varied greatly among users, but Kara Wurtz, a 39-year-old finance director in St. Louis, said after Musk bought the app, it “became a place where I wasn’t really getting what I wanted out of it anymore.”
Wurtz enjoyed entertainment, local news, and politics on the app for eight years, but the day after the election was the “final straw.”
“Every time I opened it up, it would throw things at me that put me in a bad mood,” she told NBC News. “I noticed Tuesday night into Wednesday I started to see a lot more anti-woman stuff. And I was like, ‘You know what? That’s personal. I’m done.’”
Wurtz was not the first user to notice antifemale content following the election. There was a surge in negative posts saying, “Your body my choice,” or “Repeal the 19th [Amendment].”
Wurtz and many others in her St. Louis community left X and moved to Threads, which has seen more than 15 million sign-ups in November alone and more than a million per day for the past three months.
Noelle Polo, a 22-year-old from Texas, joined BlueSky on Nov. 6 to run her Taylor Swift fan account. After establishing her account on the app, she realized “all of the Swifties joined.”
“I have a private personal account for friends and family and a public account for Taylor Swift, so nobody drowns in my Taylor Swift content,” Polo said. “Swifties have been looking for another app besides Twitter ever since Elon took over. It just wasn’t a healthy environment.”
X saw a record number of 942 million posts on Election Day but also had 115,414 account deactivations as people fled to other social media platforms.
X will also implement a new terms of service policy Friday, making all users agree to let their posts train experimental artificial intelligence. There is currently an option to opt out of the setting, but the change might further push the user exodus.
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Rory Mir of the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation said, “X is really teaching everyone the importance of who owns the sites that we use and rely on to communicate online.”
“What people are seeing with X is that it has subjectively deteriorated in value,” Mir said. “People don’t feel like the right boxes are being heard or promoted on the site. They don’t feel safe using the site in many cases.”