After Elon Musk bought Twitter (now X) in late 2022, the vibes on the platform started changing, and many accounts that were verified lost their status. But the mass exodus from X came in late 2024 following the U.S. presidential election and Musk throwing his support—and millions—behind Donald Trump.
By December 2024, the platform had lost about 2.7 million active Apple and Android users in just two months, with competitor Bluesky absorbing nearly all of those users. Colloquially, it became somewhat of a safe haven for liberal users who wanted to drown out the noise of President Trump’s reelection.
“It’s people wanting to just try something new. It’s people finding their community here,” Bluesky CEO Jay Graber told Vox Media’s Peter Kafta in a June 4 podcast. “I think in general it’s both people looking for something and people looking to get away from something.”
Between November 2024 and this May, Bluesky grew from about 10 million users to 30 million, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. Many news influencers—people who regularly post about current events on the platform—lean left politically, according to the analysis.
One such figure was billionaire Mark Cuban, who supported former Vice President Kamala Harris during her presidential run in 2024, although he didn’t give her a penny for her campaign, he said in October. Cuban became a regular Bluesky user, having posted nearly 2,000 times since November 2024. When he first joined the platform, he famously posted: “Hello Less Hateful World.”
