Liberals are fleeing Elon Musk’s X following the election victory of President-elect Donald J. Trump and seeking asylum on a decentralized network. Social media platform Bluesky’s user base has grown from over nine million in September to more than 14.6 million as of Tuesday, with a significant increase over the weekend as salty liberals left X.
The transition among users propelled Bluesky to briefly become the second most popular iPhone app in the U.S. App Store on Monday, a rise from 27th place after the elections. The app is currently ranked third, following Meta’s Threads and ChatGPT.
According to data from app intelligence firm Appfigures, Bluesky’s downloads in the U.S. have increased by 933 percent year-to-date, while X’s downloads rose by 48 percent.
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber claims higher engagement levels on the platform than on X. Liberals have been moving to Bluesky for at least a year, with a 2023 Wired article noting that liberals can censor terms and moderate the platform on their own for their account.
Other liberal Twitter clones include Meta’s Threads, which highly censors speech, and Mastodon, which was embroiled in a major Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) controversy last year.
Liberal ideology remains hegemonic on many major social media platforms, such as Reddit and Facebook.