The social media app that stole a million users from Twitter (X) after Elon Musk changed the blocking system
Elon Musk has been a boon for alternate platforms to Twitter, which he rebranded as X, since buying the social media app in 2022 for $44 billion.
Elon Musk walked through the front doors of Twitter in October 2022 carrying a sink jokingly posting a video of the stunt with the caption “Entering HQ – let that sink in!” That was just one of a couple pun-based jests the “Chief Twit” posted after his $44 billion contentious acquisition of the social media platform.
His taking over of the influential microblogging app raised concerns about how it would be managed by the self-described ‘free speech absolutist’ among users and advertisers. He didn’t let them down, slashing the workforce by 80%, clearing out much of its content moderation staff in the process. At the same time, unleashing hate speech on the platform and even placing adverts next to posts of it as well as pro-nazi ones according to a report by Media Matters for America.
He is also increasingly spreading misinformation over the platform, now rebranded X, and giving it a bullhorn with his nearly 202 million followers. This has all helped lead to an exodus of advertisers as well as coax users to move to the platforms that are competing with X.
One of them celebrated the acquisition of over a million new users after his most recent decision to change the blocking rules on X, that render it “completely pointless” while “opening the floodgates for even more harassment” on the platform says Futurism.
The social media app that stole half a million users from Twitter (X) after Elon Musk changed the blocking system
Mastodon was an early benefactor of Musk’s takeover of Twitter rising to over 2.5 million active users but that has dropped down to around 1.2 million nowadays with close to 10 million people signed up. BlueSky, another Twitter-like social media platform founded by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, has seen a spike in users and surged into the top 5 after the recent changes to X’s blocking system were announced by Musk.
The platform boasted that 500,000 new users signed up within 12 hours the same day as the changes were announced. 24 hours later the tally was over a million taking the platform more than 12 million users.
The surge of new people even caused a brief outage on the site. BlueSky, experiencing what it now calls an ‘EME’, or an Elon Musk Event, took advantage of the moment to inform users on X that “At Bluesky, we take online safety seriously.”