• Bluesky has seen a large increase in sign-ups from the UK.
• Analysts say this is likely due to users fleeing from X and its increasingly conservative-leaning algorithms.
• X’s owner Elon Musk is the platform’s most-followed peddler of misinformation with seemingly no consequences.

Jack Dorsey founded social media platform Bluesky has seen a recent increase in signups in the United Kingdom amid online misinformation-fueled riots gripping the island nation.

The company said on Monday that it saw a 60 percent increase in signups from accounts in the UK, with several members of the country’s parliament also making the jump from X, the former Twitter, which is increasingly becoming the personal mouthpiece of owner Elon Musk.

X’s algorithm also favours posts from Musk, which means that users are fed Muskisms more frequently than any other potential posts.

Members of the UK government said that Musk’s increasingly conservative stance has only made riots in the country worse, after fake news spreading online led to violent rioting and demonstrations after the mass stabbings of 13 children in Southport.

Misinformation that the perpetrator was of Arabic descent or was a Muslim led to Islamophobic attacks across the country to increase amidst the rioting. The Liverpool Crown Court later disclosed that the suspect was actually not of Arabic descent at all to counter speculation and fake news.

Musk piled more wood on the fire, saying that a religious civil war was “inevitable” in the country, according to a Reuters report. This spurred the Keir Starmer administration to begin rushing policies to police online content, such as changing the public school curriculum to include lessons on how children can spot fake news.

Meanwhile, UK users have seemingly decided to retract from the misinformation rife X in a large number, looking for greener pastures.

“For 5 out of the last 7 days, the UK had the most Bluesky signups of any country,” said Bluesky in an email.

The platform crossed one million sign ups in September 2023, and now manages nearly 700 000 monthly active users as of July – a small fraction of the nearly 80 million that use X every month.

Bluesky has yet to find its stride when it comes to its own platform, and while similar to X in many ways – or rather Twitter long before the Musk take-over, Bluesky has struggled to attract users in the number seen by Meta’s X competitor Threads, for example.

The platform is hoping its customisation options can attract more people away from X, but this will likely only interest niche users. Instead, it may be X’s own situation that does more good for Bluesky than anything its team is working on, as the former Twitter is only getting worse, seemingly, by the day.