Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and owner of the popular social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, heavily supported the Republican Party's president-elect, Donald Trump, during his campaign. This included posting on his official X account supporting Trump and appearing at Trump's rallies. Elon Musk also contributed over $100 million to Trump's campaign.
Meanwhile, Taylor Swift firmly supported Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, after Joe Biden had stepped down from the race. The singer came out in support of Harris in September 2024.
Now that Harris has lost the presidential race, many of the singer's fans, known as the Swifties, have started migrating away from Elon Musk's platform X to a new platform, Bluesky.
Bluesky is a project that came out of the vision of former Twitter (now X) CEO Jack Dorsey. It was developed as a parallel to Twitter and is a decentralized social media with an interface similar to Twitter(X). Dorsey left the organization; hence, Bluesky is now completely independent. It is currently run as an independent public benefit corporation, and its current CEO is Jay Graber.
Bluesky diverges from Elon Musk's X using an in-house-built open-source framework, the AT Protocol. The open-source framework provides greater transparency to users on how exactly Bluesky works and what happens to their data on the platform.
Bluesky was initially released as an invite-only platform. In February 2024, it became a fully public social media platform and gained more than 800,000 users in just one day. It gained popularity recently after the Supreme Court briefly banned Elon Musk's X in Brazil. This caused a mass migration of Brazilian users to Bluesky, which now has over 10 million users and counting.
Why are Swifties leaving Elon Musk's X
Swifties are leaving Elon Musk's X due to his direct support for Trump, as per the report published by Wired on November 8, 2024, and his controversial comments surrounding Taylor Swift.
After Swift announced her support of Kamala Harris, signing herself as The Childless Cat Lady, Musk responded to her announcement with the following post:
Meanwhile, Taylor Swift and her Swifties have been on the more progressive side of the political spectrum and have responded to Elon Musk's actions to use X to support the right-wing Republican Party president, Donald Trump, by moving away from the platform.
Irene Kim, an organizer in the Swiftie community, pointed out to Wired that an outpouring of misogyny after the election led many like her to migrate away from Elon Musk's X platform, stating:
“I think that's the kind of rhetoric we want to get away from. Twitter has definitely become such a hellscape."
Meanwhile, another Swiftie whose first name is Justin, who goes by @justin-the-baron.swifties.social on Bluesky, stated:
"I love the idea of building a new community here and would love not to have to support Elon in any way. Elon is of course a big Trump supporter, which doesn't align with Taylor's values or the values of Swifties."
He added:
"After the election, the timeline was full of Swifties getting DMs from Trump supporters threatening rape or se**al assault and making se**ally violent comments gloating because Trump won."
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Musk has not commented on Swifties' mass migration from X to Bluesky. Taylor Swift continues to have an X profile as of the writing of this article and has not commented on Swifties' mass migration to Bluesky either.
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