When Elon Musk took over Twitter and renamed X in 2023, he also got rid of the platform by many users and in particular from news influencers. Enter: a whole series of Twitter settings. Instagram’s answer were threads. Some users hiked to an open, decentralized alternative with mastodon. But by far the most popular Twitter replacement was bluesky. A new report shows that the news influencers on Bluesky after President Donald Trump’s elections doubled in 2024, but there are still many more news influencers on X.
“The proportion of news influences in our sample with a Bluesky account in the four months after the election day 2024 of 21 (percent) before 43 (percent) before March 2025. Most of these influencer intersection also often post on X and often post there,” said a new report from PEW Research Center. In this case, “News Influencer” can be journalists or independent content manufacturers and do not necessarily have to be associated with a certain news organization. PEW defines them as “people who regularly publish current events and bourgeois topics on social media and have at least 100,000 followers on Facebook, Instagram, Tikok, X (formerly Twitter) or YouTube”.
Bluesky falls into the moderation of content when millions of the platform join
Pew previously tried the same cohort for his project 2024 News Influencer, but did not include an analysis of the bluesky activity, since there was not enough users and news influencers on the platform at that time. In her current analysis, Pew found that about half of the news influencers they tried took to bluesky after the 2024 elections. And despite Bluesky’s growth it seems that most news influencers don’t let go of their X accounts. At the beginning of 2025, as shown from the report, 82 percent of the news influences still had their account on X.
Entertainment Scroll trend report: come soon!
“And most of these news influencers with a Bluesky account also have an X account. Only 6 (percent) of the influencers we examined have a bluesky not A bluesky account, “says the report.
News -Influencer on X are much more active than news influences on Bluesky, the report shows. While 83 percent of the news influences published an average of four or more days a week, only 21 percent of the news influences posted one to three days a week, while 48 percent were not opened regularly at all.
The news affairs that flocked to Bluesky are “mostly people on the political left”, as the report has determined. This should not be a surprise if you have ever scroll through a Bluesky time bar.
