Joy Reid joined a growing roster of progressives bidding adieu to X, Elon Musk’s social media platform that has tilted sharply to the right under the mega-billionaire’s leadership.
“It was just not worth it,” said the MSNBC host, who boasted more than 1.9 million followers. Reid said her departure has everything to do with Musk, who has transformed X into a News Max of social media — unapologetically pro-Trump.
NBC News reports X’s AI-powered trending section routinely promoted election conspiracy theories and coordinated attacks against Democrat nominee Kamala Harris in the months leading up to the election.
The exodus accelerated after Donald Trump recaptured the presidency. Musk has been by the Republican standard-bearer’s side — literally — ever since and was tapped to co-chair a commission to streamline government and dramatically cut federal spending.
“I hadn’t been posting for a long time — I just didn’t want to contribute content once it was purchased by its present owner,” Reid said in a TikTok video announcing the breakup.
She claimed she held onto her account because she feared “someone trying to take over that name and use it for nefarious purposes.”
Reid asked her followers to join her on BlueSky, which was created by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.
While X experienced its largest loss of users since Musk purchased it in 2022, more than 1 million people — most from the U.S. — joined BlueSky in the past week, giving Dorsey’s new platform a user base of more than 15 million. Meanwhile, Instagram Threads says it has surpassed 275 million active users.
Former CNN anchor Don Lemon was another high-profile get for BlueSky. He posted his farewell video on X, earlier Wednesday, saying the platform has lost its way.
“I have loved connecting with all of you on Twitter and then on X for all of these years, but it’s time for me to leave,” Lemon said. “I once believed that it was a place for honest debate and discussion, transparency, and free speech, but I now feel that it does not serve that purpose.”
The Guardian, a left-leaning publication out of the U.K., decamped from X earlier this week, citing its “disturbing content” peppered with “far-right conspiracy theories and racism.”
Around the time Reid posted her goodbye, pop star Lizzo announced her departure to BlueSky, saying, “We’re leaving toxicity in 2024.”
Musk spent the last two days on Twitter congratulating Trump’s cabinet nominations and reposting content that praised X for being “the best platform.” He has seemingly ignored the loss of major political pundits and other celebrities making public declarations for their exit.
Meanwhile, MAGA users reveled in the left’s retreat.
“The Meltdown is hilarious,” posted one commenter. “Wait until they realize no one cares and come crawling back.”
“These leftists would rather run from the last four years than defend them…. Proving there’s no defending the (sic) indefensable,” trumpeted another.
Actress Justine Bateman, meanwhile, lampooned the ponderous announcements from public figures like Lemon.
“First a video about leaving, and now a written statement? This is more notice than we got from Biden when he dropped out of the race,” Bateman wrote.
But it’s not just celebrities who are migrating from X.
“Every time I opened it up, it would throw things at me that put me in a bad mood,” Kara Wurtz, a 39-year-old finance director from St. Louis, told NBC News. “I noticed Tuesday night into Wednesday I started to see a lot more anti-woman stuff. And I was like, ‘You know what? That’s personal. I’m done.’”
When he purchased Twitter in April 2022, Musk vowed the site would not take political sides.
“For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally,” he said.
Musk maintains that X is politically neutral.
“We’re very rigorous on the X platform about being a fair playing field, a level playing field, being fair to all sides,” he said this month at a town hall event in Pennsylvania. “We want both sides to say their piece and to let there be a free debate.”
A spokesperson for X declined to say how many users have left the platform but pointed to metrics revealing 942 million posts in the last week, an all-time high. David Carr, the editor of news insights and research at Similarweb, told NBC the platform has totaled more than 115,000 deactivations since Election Day.
X could see more accounts close starting Friday when a new terms of service policy goes into effect that requires all users to consent to having their posts be used to train artificial intelligence.
Regardless of the numbers, it’s clear X is on a path to becoming just another right-wing echo chamber.
Conversely, BlueSky seems poised to emerge as a leftist enclave, ensuring that, once again, diversity of thought will be the biggest loser.
