Donald Trump’s victory has had knock-on effects on the United States, affecting almost all sectors, including tech and social media. Or rather, to be more clear, social media, more than any other, has played a role in the success of the former American president. I am talking about X, Elon Musk’s platform, which has shown increasing support for Trump as voting has approached, not only by spearheading a group of backers who have donated $200 million to the Republican presidential candidate. Musk has posted many messages on his X account urging US citizens to vote for the tycoon, going so far as to attend some of the latest election rallies of the new White House tenant.
His support has been rewarded by Trump, who chose Musk to head the Department of Government Efficiency, also known as Doge, the same name as the cryptocurrency that Musk himself has always supported. Although technically, this Department is not a part of the administration, the owner of X will be one of the most influential faces of the Trump government, not least because of the implications of the South African entrepreneur’s appointment with his businesses, which range from electric cars (Tesla) to space (SpaceX), telco (Starlink) and even biomedical technological evolution (Neurolink).
Escape and growth are two sides of the same coin
In light of Musk’s campaigning, Trump’s victory and his tenure when the new presidency begins in 2025, many X users have chosen to leave the platform. The day after the announcement that the future president of the United States will be Trump, more than 115,000 accounts were deactivated within 24 hours. Figures that do not worry Musk, not least because the decision to minimise the moderation of content published on the platform to encourage maximum freedom of expression is paying off in terms of numbers.
Beyond the 570 million users (even if the active ones are many fewer), the day after the vote in the United States, X recorded 46.5 million accesses in the United States alone, an increase of 38% compared to the average of the previous months. This is a significant figure because it is good to keep this in mind: Musk is almost exclusively interested in the US market, the one where he has his business interests.
It is news, of course, that a prestigious publication like The Guardian has abandoned X. ‘It’s a toxic environment, influencing public opinion to shape political debate,’ said those in charge of the British newspaper, which has closed all its profiles, giving up more than 27 million followers. That something is changing is also understood by the less famous users, who complain on the same social media site about the continuous loss of followers.
It is a reflection of the flight of so many former members, but perhaps also of the reduction of bots, as more than a few analysts have speculated about Trump’s victory, which is considered Musk’s ultimate goal. In this regard, it should be pointed out that several users have recorded a large drop in views, likes and followers after criticising the owner of X himself in more than one message.
Precisely because the United States has always been and will always be at the centre of the platform’s dynamics, it seems difficult to imagine that X will suffer a decline in relevance. It should be remembered that, despite the many changes made since Musk’s arrival, the former Twitter remains the social media of breaking news, the only one that tells in real time what is happening worldwide. Those who have so far likely followed Trump on Truth will move to X to have an even wider and more immediate reach on what is happening in the United States. At the same time, those disappointed by Trump and Musk will migrate elsewhere, choosing between Mastodon, Threads and Bluesky.
Bluesky grows, but not enough
The latter has gained the most new members since the flight from X. In the first ten days after the US presidential elections, Bluesky said it had registered more than 1 million new users. There are several reasons for this, and they relate to the microblogging site’s nature, which resembles early Twitter in several ways. Not only because it was founded by Jack Dorsey, one of the founders of Twitter, of which he was the CEO for many years.
Even though Dorsey himself abandoned his last project, Bluesky was the most popular among users hunting for a new platform because it is based on decentralisation. Contrary to all the best-known social media, which are run by a single entity, in this case, users have more control over their data and are not bound to the platform since the open-source system underlying Bluesky allows them to share posts also from other networks using the same AT protocol.
Beyond the reflex wave generated by the abandonment of so many users from X, after a few years of its birth and despite the meteoric rediscovery, it seems at least far-fetched to speculate that Bluesky might be able to rival X. Because more than the difference in membership numbers, there is currently too much distance in relevance within the social debate: Bluesky is marginal, X a reference point for all the others.
