Prominent X Accounts—Including The Guardian And Don Lemon—Are Leaving Elon Musk’s Site. Here’s Why.

 

BATH, UNITED KINGDOM - AUGUST 01: In this photo illustration the logo of US online social media and social networking site 'X' (formerly known as Twitter) is displayed centrally on a smartphone screen alongside that of Threads (L) and Instagram (R).

Accounts on X with large followings—such as actress Jamie Lee Curtis, journalist Don Lemon and The Guardian’s official news accounts—have decided to leave the platform after Donald Trump’s election to a second term, saying X, formerly known as Twitter, promotes the far-right and raising concerns about owner Elon Musk’s relationship with the president-elect.

Key Facts

The Guardian newspaper—which controls dozens of accounts on the platform that have about 27 million followers combined—announced its plans Wednesday to stop engaging with the platform, citing its worries about “far-right conspiracy theories” and racism, and alleging the presidential election confirmed “X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse.”

Lemon—who has more than 1.5 million followers on X and is embroiled in a lawsuit against Musk and X—posted Wednesday that he once considered the company a tool for “debate and discussion” but decided to leave after seeing X’s new terms of service, which only allows future legal action against the platform to be handled through the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas (seemingly a strategy by the company to remain in the hands of Texas’ conservative courts, according to reporting from The Washington Post, citing legal experts).

Curtis, who had more than 745,000 followers and deactivated her X account Wednesday, posted a prayer on Instagram with a photo showing her deactivated account, but she did not specify why she decided to shut down her account.

Tangent

Wired reported on Nov. 8, citing interviews with individuals who left X, that fans of mega-star Taylor Swift are leaving the platform after the election because of Musk’s ownership and saying it has become a “hellscape.”

Key Background

Musk was a key figure in Trump’s presidential campaign and has continued to ingratiate himself with the president-elect, developing an outsized influence that has culminated in his role in the new Trump administration as the head of a newly conceived “Department of Government Efficiency.” Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and became a controversial and increasingly far-right voice on the site. The platform also started to skew toward a conservative audience. Several high-profile advertisers dropped off the platform in 2022 and 2023 in response to antisemitic activity propagating on the platform, leading to Musk famously calling out Disney CEO Bob Iger when asked about fleeing advertisers during an interview in 2023. Since Musk’s takeover of Twitter, NPR has also left the platform after its accounts were labeled “state-affiliated media,” though the labeling has since been dropped. A similar exodus of high-profile personalities from X happened in 2022 after Musk bought the platform, with celebrity exits from author John Green, White Stripes lead artist Jack White, Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, comedian and actress Whoopi Goldberg, comedian Shonda Rhimes and model Gigi Hadid. Some, like Green and Rhimes, later returned.

How Many Accounts Have Left X Recently?

Estimates from research firm Sensor Tower show X has shrunk by about 27% in terms of global daily active users on the app over the past two years, but it’s still dominant—average time spent on the platform increased 32% around Election Day, compared to the previous 30 days (Bluesky had an 18% increase and Threads had a 23% increase). X’s user base grew 17% from last year, according to Sensor Tower.

Big Numner

Estimates from research firm Similarweb show more than 46 million people flocked to X (a platform record for 2024), and more than 115,000 U.S. internet-based X users killed their accounts the day after the election. Meanwhile, Bluesky's web traffic shot into millions of visits around the time of the election.

What Is Bluesky?

Bluesky, which became widely available in 2024, is a social media platform with a similar text-based nature to Twitter. It was created by former longtime Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, a billionaire who later left the organization. Since its launch in 2021, Bluesky has accumulated more than 14 million users. It has added about 1 million users since Nov. 4 from across North America and Britain, according to Emily Liu, a spokesperson from the company. That means Bluesky is still a small fraction of the size of X—which reported in March it reaches 250 million daily users and has 550 million visitors a month—and smaller than Meta’s Threads, which reported earlier in November it has more than 275 million monthly users.