Two years have passed since Elon Musk took over Twitter. The term that probably best describes this period is… chaos. There is no trace left of the “good old Twitter”. And it's not just about changing the name of the website, but about a number of incomprehensible decisions made over recent months – from mass layoffs of employees, through a new user verification system, to the war with advertisers and ignoring online extremism.
One of Musk's promises before taking over Twitter was to depoliticize the platform, which – according to the billionaire himself – promoted extremely liberal content, while at the same time cutting off the reach of people and institutions that presented more conservative views. Musk has fulfilled this promise all too well, because over recent months X has turned into a veritable propaganda mouthpiece for the far right.
This was especially visible during the US presidential election campaign. Boss X supported Donald Trump and used the platform to strengthen the message of the Republican Party candidate.
Now, as a reward, he received an important position in the administration of the future US president. On Wednesday, Donald Trump officially announced that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, investor from the biotechnology industry will head the newly created Department of Government Effectiveness (DOGE).
Together, these two great Americans will pave the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, reduce unnecessary regulation, reduce unnecessary spending, and restructure federal agencies, which is central to the Save America movement.
– wrote Donald Trump in a statement.
Bluesky number one in the App Store. The Great Escape with X
Elon Musk's entry into Donald Trump's administration means that the vision of true depoliticization of X is becoming even more distant. The billionaire himself has already announced that the platform will play an important role in informing the public about the activities of the Efficiency Department he manages.
Recent events have spilled the beans for some users of the former Twitter. They stop using the website and move to alternative platforms. This trend can be seen, for example, in the statistics of the Apple App Store, where the first place in the ranking of the most popular applications is currently occupied by Bluesky, and the second place – Instagram Threads.
BlueSky is a social networking site created by Jack Dorseyone of the creators of… Twitter. It offers functions quite similar to X, although it has a slightly more modern layout. The number of platform users has already exceeded 15 million. It is also estimated that 100,000 new accounts have been created every day since the elections.
It is also experiencing a renaissance Instagram Threads, i.e. a website created by the Meta group owned by Mark Zuckerberg. Threads had its “five minutes” last July, when 100 million users created accounts on the platform within a few days of its debut. Of course, this was greatly helped by the fact that Threads was integrated with the extremely popular Instagram.
X is a hegemon and will remain so for a long time
Even if X loses a certain number of users in the near future, its position still seems unthreatened. It is worth remembering that the platform has already experienced the “first exodus” right after it was taken over by Elon Musk. At that time, it was said that the record-breaking popularity of Mastodon could become the “new Twitter”. After two years, few people remember that a website like Mastodon even exists.
AX is still doing very well. Similarweb data shows that the daily number of active users is 253 million, and on a monthly basis, he actively uses the platform 600 million users (of course, it is impossible to estimate what percentage of this are bots). For comparison, Instagram Threads boasts “only” 38 million daily active users and 175 million users per month.