Even Google appears to trust X less, with one expert telling Sky News the search engine treats X competitor Bluesky as 10 times more important than Elon Musk’s platform.
Actress Jamie Lee Curtis, The Guardian newspaper, and even the Clifton Suspension Bridge have joined swathes of people deserting Elon Musk’s social media site X.
Millions have instead joined Bluesky, which has a stronger focus on moderation, set up by former Twitter founder Jack Dorsey – who is now no longer affiliated with the social media platform – in 2019.
According to the official Bluesky account, a million people joined the platform in just one day this week, after Musk was given a position in Donald Trump’s government.
“The alignment of Mr Musk with president-elect Trump and his use of the platform to promote the interests of president-elect Trump is obviously driving out a lot of people,” says Adam Tinworth, a social media expert and digital journalism lecturer at City St George’s University.
But, he says, this is just the latest exodus from Musk’s platform – and people aren’t just leaving for political reasons.
“Many of us for whom Twitter was a major part of our social network landscape have been backing away just on pragmatic grounds, [because] the algorithm has been retuned,” he says.
When Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, he cut roughly 80% of the company’s workforce, according to an interview he gave the BBC.
That “gutting” of the organisation, says Mr Tinworth, has resulted in a worse experience on the platform.
“There aren’t the same resources behind it and his priorities for what he’s doing there are not necessarily driven towards the trust and safety end of it, which is content moderation, removing bots from the system, those sorts of things.”
The lack of moderation appears to be impacting life outside of X too.
Jason Barnard, the chief executive of Kalicube, spent nine years gathering three billion different data points that Google uses to decide what is factual information.
He told Sky News that although X has a long-standing agreement with Google to allow the search engine to use X posts to help it understand the world, Google’s trust appears to be waning.
“Bluesky is 20 times smaller in terms of the number of people on the platform,” he says. “If you search for people [on Google], you will find Bluesky 10 times less often than you will find X.
“But,” he says, “it’s 10 times more important to Google today for factual information.”
