On November 6, the day after the election, X experienced its largest user exodus since Elon Musk acquired the platform in 2022. And now users are flocking to alternative text-based social media apps like Bluesky and Instagram’s Threads.
That number appears to be growing as users and brands like The Guardian and Don Lemon continue to announce their exit from the platform.
NBC News spoke to six people who joined or committed to using Threads and Bluesky instead of X after the election because of Musk. They each cited growing problems with I felt that I had reached it. Since then, Musk has participated in phone calls and meetings with Trump to discuss the presidential transition.
For Kara Wurtz, a 39-year-old financial director in St. Louis, the day after the election was “the final test.” Wirtz said that after using Twitter for “eight years” under Musk’s leadership, the platform, renamed X, “became a place where I wasn’t really getting what I wanted.”
“Every time I opened it, something was thrown at me and I was in a bad mood,” she told NBC News. “From Tuesday night to Wednesday, I noticed an increase in anti-women content. And I thought, ‘You know what?’ It’s personal. I’m done. ‘”
Wurtz said she used X primarily for local news, politics and entertainment, but has now switched to Threads, where she first created an account when the service launched last year. But her local St. Louis community wasn’t there yet. Over the past five days, Wertz said the thread has started to trickle in with people who previously followed him on X.
Wurtz is not alone. The platform says more than 1 million people have joined Bluesky in the past week, pushing its user base to more than 15 million, and Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said on Nov. 3 that Threads is a monthly active user. It was announced that the number has exceeded 275 million.
Daily traffic to Bluesky surpassed Threads traffic on November 6, according to data from Similarweb, a third-party company that tracks social media analytics. Bluesky is currently #1. There’s one free app on Apple’s App Store just beyond Threads.
“The majority of new users in this influx are from the United States, followed by Canada and the United Kingdom,” a Blue Sky representative told NBC News in an email. “We’re excited to welcome all these new people, from Swifties to wrestlers to city planners.”
A spokesperson for X declined to provide numbers on how many people have recently left the platform, but the site released a metric last week showing that the company’s postings reached a record high of 942 million. He pointed out that he did.
David Carr, editor of news insights and research at SimilarWeb, provided data to NBC News that confirms that X received the most traffic of the year during the presidential campaign. However, the following day, on November 6th, an investigation found that 115,414 accounts were deactivated on X, the most since Musk took ownership of the site.
Noel Polo, a 22-year-old Texan, joined Blue Sky the night after the election. When she woke up the morning after joining Blue Sky, she said, “All the Swifties were there.” Polo is one of thousands of people running fan accounts about Taylor Swift, forming one of the largest fandoms. On November 6th, a notable Swifties exodus from X landed on Blue Sky. Mr. Polo prefers Blue Sky to Threads because it is not associated with an Instagram account.
“I have a private personal account for my friends and family and a public Taylor Swift account so no one is drowning in my Taylor Swift content,” Polo said. “Ever since Elon took over, Swifties have been looking for other apps besides Twitter. It’s never been a healthy environment.”
“X is a huge concern for who owns the sites we use and rely on to communicate online,” said Rory Meal, associate director of community organizing at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. “We’re teaching everyone the importance of this.”
“What people are seeing with X is that it’s subjectively devalued,” Mir continued. “People don’t feel like the right boxes are being heard or promoted on the site. In many cases, they don’t feel safe using the site.”
For other X users who have used the platform to grow their audience and find community, deciding whether to stop posting or delete their accounts is not easy.
“From a human perspective, it’s hard to leave behind a technology that was so beneficial to your development,” says Jose Vilson, educator and best-selling author who currently writes for X, Threads, and Bluesky. speaks. “I’m probably going to post less, but I don’t plan on deleting my account unless I think I’ll be in big trouble if I don’t.”
Laura Sell, marketing and social media manager at Duke University Press, said the nonprofit brand will continue to post on X, which has more than 50,000 followers, while growing its following on Bluesky and Threads. He said he is working on it. Sell said that both the company’s Bluesky and Threads accounts have seen an increase in follower numbers this week, with Bluesky having more followers, but not yet reaching X amount of followers.
“It’s really hard to leave that,” she said. “If something really bad starts to happen, I think we’ll have a conversation. Maybe we’ll start hearing from authors.”
For those who leave the platform, it’s not clear what to do with their accounts.
On Friday, X will adopt a new terms of service policy that for the first time explicitly states that all users consent to their posts being used to train artificial intelligence like the company’s generative AI service Grok. Currently, X users can opt out by going to the site’s settings.
The new agreement says anyone who uses the site agrees that its content can be used to “train our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or otherwise.” .
Due to this change, some people may want to delete all posts or even delete their account entirely.
Several free services exist that automatically delete all posts on an account, but the ones reviewed by NBC News either don’t guarantee negative consequences, such as possible account suspension, or require technical work. is required. Some companies, such as TweetDelete and Circleboom, offer automatic tweet deletion services for paid subscribers.
Mika Lee, a privacy advocate and developer and former director of information security at Intercept, told NBC News that the company is developing a new free service called Cyd that will remove posts from multiple platforms, including X. However, he said this will not be released to general users. It will be open to the public until next week.
“If you delete your account, someone else can use your handle to buy blue checks and potentially impersonate you,” Mir said. “That could be one reason, especially if you’re a public figure and somewhat of a public figure, to keep that namespace and not use the site anymore.”
Dr. Jorge Caballero, a data scientist and public health communicator, said he regularly reactivates his X account since leaving the platform in 2022 for that reason. However, shortly after the election, he said he had permanently disabled his account.
“There’s no value in keeping that username at this point,” Caballero said. He now uses Bluesky full-time. “We have enough journalists, community leaders, advocates, and science communicators that we need to really make a difference and inform the public. Right now, it’s just right.”
