This isn’t the first time that members of the media have pledged to quit Elon Musk
This article was originally published by Columbia Journalism Review on 21/11/2024 and is hereby reproduced by iMEdD with permission. Any reprint permissions are subject to the original publisher.
As the dust settles following the election, a pressing question has arisen—again—within journalism circles as to what to do about X, a platform whose owner, Elon Musk, has acted in hostile ways toward members of the mainstream press, wholeheartedly backed Donald Trump’s election bid, and is now preparing to lead a not-yet-existent Department of Government Efficiency under Trump’s administration. Some journalists have simply decided to leave. Last week, The Guardian announced that it would stop posting on X altogether, citing “disturbing content” promoted on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism. La Vanguardia, a Spanish newspaper, joined the exodus, also citing “toxic content.” Several high-profile journalists and media figures have individually taken the leap as well, announcing that they’re either leaving the platform completely or plan to spend significantly less time on it.
While X hit a yearly traffic peak on Election Day, that was followed by the highest exit numbers since Musk acquired the platform, then known as Twitter, in 2022: over a hundred and fifteen thousand users in the US deactivated their accounts the day after the election, according to The Independent. The exodus has translated, at least in part, into a surge of new users joining Bluesky, a social network launched by Jack Dorsey in 2019, while he was still the chief executive of Twitter. (Dorsey left Bluesky’s board of directors in May.) As of Tuesday, the platform was reaching twenty million users, over 40 percent of whom have joined since late October. As Wired put it, when it comes to reactions to a Trump election victory, “I’m Moving to Bluesky” may be the new “I’m Moving to Canada.”
Charlie Warzel, a staff writer at The Atlantic, is among the journalists to have waved goodbye, having done so even before the election. “After watching the racism dial turn further and further on this site, I decided to try and publicly make as definitive a case as I could,” he posted on X. “We’re so far past the point of no return that I’m out of excuses for myself.” Jay Rosen, a press critic and journalism professor at New York University, announced his intention to leave as well. “For a while Twitter was a way to do journalism education in public, for a public—and for free,” he wrote on X. “I no longer know how that’s done.” Rosen, who is on Bluesky, added that while he will no longer be participating in the discourse on X, he will keep his account there open.
Bluesky is definitely having a moment; at time of writing, it was the number one trending app on Apple’s App Store. But it’s still not clear if the excitement will stick. After all, this isn’t the first time that many journalists have threatened to leave Twitter; after Musk completed his purchase of the platform, members of the media around the world held their breath. Journalists “think they’re better than everybody else,” Musk tweeted in December 2022, and proceeded to suspend half a dozen tech reporters who had tweeted about an account that shared publicly available travel data relating to Musk’s personal jet. Despite this strained relationship, a Tow Center analysis from February 2023 found that, among a sample of four thousand journalists from nineteen US publications including the New York Times and the Washington Post, only ten had deactivated their accounts since Musk took over.
And some journalists who appeared to have left Musk’s X eventually returned. Ezra Klein, the New York Times columnist and podcast host, stopped posting there two years ago, right before Musk’s acquisition. (It was “astonishing at this point” that journalists were still using the platform, he wrote.) But Klein returned to X in July, and has been active ever since. Semafor’s Max Tani asked Klein about this U-turn. “Twitter is bad for a lot of things,” Klein replied, “but it’s good for factional conversations and this is a very factional moment inside the Democratic Party.”
According to Aske Kammer, an associate professor of journalism studies at Roskilde University in Denmark, Bluesky’s success in media circles will depend on whether journalists’ sources stay on X or themselves move to Bluesky. As long as politicians, businesses, and interest groups remain on X, Kammer said, it will be difficult for journalists to abandon it completely. For Kammer, “the big question is whether journalists will actually leave X, or divide their attention between both platforms.” Dan Kennedy, a professor at Northeastern University’s journalism school, notes that journalists’ digital footprints are becoming more scattered compared with the era when Twitter was a more unified hub of conversation. “I don’t think there’s going to be one platform anymore,” he said. “But I do think that Bluesky is reaching a critical mass where I can read most of what I need to read and do most of what I want to do on Bluesky.”
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Back in 2022, Darren Linvill, a social media researcher and associate professor at Clemson University, said that journalists were reluctant to leave X since they had invested years in building a following there. “We’re talking about their brand here,” Linvill said. “Especially when you don’t know what the future holds. I mean, maybe Elon is gonna give it up.” Two years later, it doesn’t appear as if Musk is going anywhere anytime soon. For some users, his recent political activity—combined, perhaps, with the declining technical quality of X under his ownership—has been the final straw. (“Many journalists have a tough time professionally being on a platform owned by a political actor,” Kammer said.) In the aftermath of the election, Tow reran its analysis of four thousand journalists on X and found that the number leaving had increased to two hundred and ten—a noticeable jump, especially since that figure does not include journalists who have transitioned from active posters to “lurkers,” who see what other people are saying on X but no longer contribute to the discourse themselves.
In the lead-up to the election, Kammer said that he’d noticed a surge in users on Bluesky, including media figures and academics, actually participating in discussions there. And a migration isn’t just happening in the US; there are also traces of one in Denmark, where Kammer is based, and more broadly in Europe. From a research perspective, Kammer said, this is an exciting moment; a new window for change has opened up. “To me, Bluesky has a bit of the feel that Twitter had ten years ago,” he said. “It’s a bit of a blast from the past.”
