On the day after the election, Nov. 6, X experienced its largest user exodus since Elon Musk bought the platform in 2022. And now, users are flooding to alternative text-based social media apps like Bluesky and Instagram’s Threads.
Those numbers appear to be climbing, as users and brands like The Guardian and Don Lemon continue to announce their departures from the platform.
NBC News spoke to six people who have joined or committed to using Threads and Bluesky in place of X after the election because of Musk. Each of them cited growing issues on X, including bots, partisan advertisements and harassment, which they all felt reached a tipping point when Donald Trump was elected president last week with Musk’s support. Musk has since joined Trump on calls and in meetings to weigh in on his transition to president.
For Kara Wurtz, a 39-year-old finance director in St. Louis, the day after the election was the “final straw.” After using Twitter for “a good eight years,” Wurtz said under Musk’s leadership, the platform, renamed X, “became a place where I wasn’t really getting what I wanted out of it anymore.”
Get Tri-state area news delivered to your inbox.> Sign up for NBC New York's News Headlines newsletter.
“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, who said she mainly used X for local news, politics and entertainment, has now switched to Threads, where she initially created an account when it launched last year. But her local St. Louis community wasn’t there yet. In the past five days, Wurtz said people she used to follow on X have started to trickle over to Threads.
Wurtz isn’t alone. More than 1 million people joined Bluesky in the past week, the platform said, bringing its user base to over 15 million people, while head of Instagram Adam Mosseri announced Nov. 3 that Threads had surpassed 275 million monthly active users.
U.S. & World
According to data from Similarweb, a third-party company that tracks social media analytics, daily traffic to Bluesky jumped above that of Threads on Nov. 6. Bluesky is currently the no. 1 free app on Apple’s App Store, directly ahead of Threads.
“The majority of new users in this influx is from the United States, followed by Canada and the UK,” a representative for Bluesky told NBC News in an email. “We’re excited to welcome all of these new people, ranging from Swifties to wrestlers to city planners.”
A spokesperson for X declined to provide numbers for how many people have left the platform recently, but pointed to metrics the site announced last week that the company saw 942 million posts, an all-time high.
David Carr, the editor of news insights and research at Similarweb, provided NBC News with data that confirmed that during the presidential election, X got the most traffic it has all year. But the day after, Nov. 6, X also saw 115,414 account deactivations, the most it has gotten since Musk took ownership of the site, the research found.
Noëlle Polo, a 22-year-old Texan, joined Bluesky the night after the election. When she woke up the morning after she joined Bluesky, she said, “all of the Swifties joined.” Polo is one of thousands of people who run fan accounts about Taylor Swift, forming one of the largest fandoms. On Nov. 6, a notable exodus of the Swifties from X landed on Bluesky, which Polo prefers to Threads because it isn’t connected to her Instagram account.
“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.”
Rory Mir, an associate director of community organizing at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that “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 continued. “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.”
For other X users who used the platform to build an audience and find a community, the decision of whether to stop posting or delete their account isn’t an easy one.
“From a human perspective, it’s tough to leave a technology that was so beneficial to my growth,” said José Vilson, an educator and bestselling author who is currently posting on X, Threads and Bluesky. “I’m probably going to post less, but I’m not going to delete the account unless it’s like, if you don’t do this, you’re going to be in huge trouble.”
Laura Sell, a marketing and social media manager for Duke University Press, said the nonprofit brand is working to build a following on Bluesky and Threads while still remaining and posting on X, where it has more than 50,000 followers. Sell said that while the publisher’s Bluesky and Threads accounts both saw an uptick in followers this week, with more on Bluesky, they have yet to reach the size of its X following.
“It’s just so hard to leave that,” she said. “I think we’d have a conversation if something really egregious started happening, we would probably start hearing from our authors.”
For people leaving the platform, it hasn’t been clear-cut on what to do with their accounts.
On Friday, X will adopt a new terms of service policy that for the first time explicitly says all users agree to let their posts be used to train artificial intelligence, like the company’s generative AI service, Grok. Currently, X users can go to the site’s settings and opt out.
Anyone using the site agrees that their content can be used for “training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type,” the new agreement says.
That change may inspire some to want to delete all of their posts, or potentially fully delete their accounts.
While several free services to automatically delete all of an account’s posts exist, ones reviewed by NBC News either don’t guarantee against adverse effects like potentially suspending the account or require some technical work. Some companies, like TweetDelete and Circleboom, offer automatic tweet deletion services for paid subscribers.
Micah Lee, a privacy advocate and developer and the former director of information security at The Intercept, told NBC News he is developing a new free service to delete posts from multiple platforms, including X, called Cyd, but that it will not be released to the public until next week.
“If you delete your account, someone else can use your handle and buy a blue check and pretend to be you potentially,” Mir said. “So that might be one reason, particularly if you’re a public, somewhat public figure, to hold on to that namespace and just not use the site anymore.”
Dr. Jorge Caballero, a data scientist and public health communicator, said he has periodically reactivated his X account since leaving the platform in 2022 for that reason. But shortly after the election, he said he deactivated his account for good.
“There’s no value in keeping that username at this point,” Caballero said. He is now using Bluesky full time. “It has enough of the journalists, the community leaders, the advocates and science communicators that are necessary to actually effect change and inform the public. So far, it’s just right.”
This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:
