When Elon Musk took over Twitter and renamed it X in 2023, he also got rid of features that many users, and, particularly, news influencers, loved about the platform. Enter: a whole host of Twitter replacements. Instagram's answer was Threads. Some users migrated to an open-source, decentralized alternative with Mastodon. But by far the most popular Twitter replacement was Bluesky. A new report shows that while news influencers on Bluesky doubled after President Donald Trump's 2024 election, there are still way more news influencers remaining on X.
"The share of news influencers in our sample with a Bluesky account roughly doubled in the four months after Election Day 2024, from 21 [percent] beforehand to 43 [percent] by March 2025. Most of these influencers – including left-leaning ones – are also on X and post there frequently," a new report from Pew Research Center reads. In this case, "news influencers" can be journalists or independent content creators, and don't necessarily have to be connected to a specific news organization. Pew defines them as "individuals who regularly post about current events and civic issues on social media and have at least 100,000 followers on any of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter) or YouTube."
Pew previously sampled the same cohort for its 2024 news influencers project, but didn't include an analysis of Bluesky activity, because there weren't enough users and news influencers on the platform at that time. In their current analysis, Pew found that about half of the news influencers they sampled joined Bluesky after the 2024 election. And, despite Bluesky's growth, it appears most news influencers aren't letting go of their X accounts. As of early 2025, the report shows, 82 percent of news influencers still have their account on X.
"And most of these news influencers with a Bluesky account also have an X account. Only 6 [percent] of the influencers we studied have a Bluesky account but not an X account, while 37 [percent] have both. The largest share (46 [percent]) have an X account but not a Bluesky account," the report reads.
News influencers on X are much more active than news influencers on Bluesky, the report shows. While 83 percent of news influencers on X posted on average four or more days each week, just 21 percent of news influencers on Bluesky post one to three days each week, while 48 percent did not post regularly at all.
The news influencers who flocked to Bluesky are "largely people on the political left," the report found. That shouldn't come as a surprise if you've ever scrolled through a Bluesky timeline.
