By Aditya Soni and Jaspreet Singh
(Reuters) -Social media platform Bluesky is adding millions of users as people flee X after Donald Trump was elected U.S. president and as a pending change to its terms of service threatens to complicate legal challenges for the Elon Musk-owned platform.
Bluesky added about 2.5 million new users in the past week, bringing its total number of users to more than 16 million, it said Thursday. It is among a slew of apps looking to replace the platform formerly known as Twitter following Musk’s takeover.
“We are seeing record high activity levels across all different forms of engagement: likes, followers, new accounts, etc., and we are on track to add 1 million new users in one day alone,” Bluesky said in a statement.
Several well-known organizations and personalities, including the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate, British news publisher The Guardian and former CNN anchor Don Lemon, have said they are leaving conditions.
X was called out by disinformation experts during the election for playing a central role in enabling the spread of false information across key battleground states.
On November 6, when news broke that Musk ally Trump won the presidency, months, according to analytics firm Similar web (NYSE:).
But more than 115,000 U.S. web visitors have deactivated their X accounts — the most since Musk bought the platform, SimilarWeb data showed.
Bluesky’s website, meanwhile, attracted about 1.2 million visitors on Nov. 6, more than Meta (NASDAQ:) Platforms-owned Threads, which attracted about 950,000 visitors. But the Threads app had more visitors than Bluesky’s.
“The excessive growth, especially for Bluesky, may have been driven by an increase in controversial content or technical issues with competitor X,” said Abraham Yousef, senior insights analyst at market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.
“The departure of popular accounts, media personalities or organizations may have led consumers to conclude that X is no longer their platform of choice, which could also drive growth on other platforms, particularly Bluesky and Threads.”
CONDITIONS CHANGE
The Bluesky wave comes ahead of a change to .
The Center for Countering Digital Hate said Thursday that the change could hinder legal challenges against the platform by sending future lawsuits to judges who Musk believes will be “on his side.”
“Now the billionaire will be able to file lawsuits against anyone who disagrees with him on his platform,” said the nonprofit that has accused Musk of spreading hate speech on X.
X and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
Still, Bluesky’s user base is much smaller than that of rivals. Threads has about 252 million monthly active users on its mobile app, while X has about 317 million, according to Sensor Tower.
“X appears to be in a better position than it has in a while, given its ability to represent the views of newly elected President Trump,” said DA Davidson & Co analyst Gil Luria.
“Although there are other competing platforms, they may have a hard time catching up because microblogging has significant network effects.”
