Social Media Services:

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What is Bluesky, the fast-growing social platform welcoming fleeing X users?

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Disgruntled X users are again flocking to Bluesky, a newer social media platform that grew out of the former Twitter before billionaire Elon Musk took it over in 2022. While it remains small compared to established online spaces such as X, it has emerged as an alternative for those looking for a different mood, lighter and friendlier and less influenced by Musk.

https://apnews.com/article/bluesky-x-twitter-dcc4f92f9d0386dbacc3f30376b38dbc?

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About 20% of Americans regularly get their news from influencers on social media, report says

About one in five Americans – and a virtually identical share of Republicans and Democrats – regularly get their news from digital influencers who are more likely to be found on the social media platform X, according to a report released Monday by the Pew Research Center.

https://apnews.com/article/influencers-election-trump-harris-news-eacd42bce73d6e11cbc760caf28c993a?

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📱 Bluesky's moment

Data: Similarweb. Chart: Jacque Schrag/Axios Social media platform Bluesky is having a moment, as people — mostly liberals — test out potential alternatives to Elon Musk's X. 📈 It's jumped up to about 3 million active users per day since Election Day — a 519% increase from the first 10 months of the year, according to data from Similarweb. That's enough to catch up to Threads, Meta's X competitor, but not nearly enough to catch up to X, which still has over 10 times more daily users than its putative rivals.

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One Tech Tip: How to get started with Bluesky

LONDON (AP) — Looking for a new social media platform because X, Threads and Mastodon just aren’t cutting it? You could try Bluesky.

https://apnews.com/article/bluesky-twitter-x-social-media-musk-1a5a658a0c5a339e53fcb0e1928df6ee?

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📱 Left's media ecosystem grows

Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios

Left-leaning apps, news websites and social networks are experiencing a spike in engagement, further dividing the internet along political lines, Axios Media Trends author Sara Fischer writes. Bluesky, an alternative to Elon Musk's X, has seen a 519% spike in daily users in the weeks after the election. Lefty, a dating app for progressives, has experienced a 453% surge in downloads in the two weeks since the election, founder and CEO Alex Felipelli told Axios. Slate and The Guardian both saw significant new numbers of paid subscribers, as people who supported Vice President Harris look for more explicitly liberal takes on the news. 🖥️ Flashback: Conservatives were the ones trying to build their own internet ecosystem toward the end of the Trump administration — particularly after Jan. 6, when most of the internet's biggest platforms de-platformed then-President Trump. Musk bought X. Peter Thiel and Vice President-elect JD Vance invested in Rumble, a YouTube alternative for conservatives, which has since gone public. Trump launched Truth Social, which is now public. Thiel backed the creation of The Right Stuff, a conservative dating app that now has 3.4 million followers on TikTok.

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Exclusive: Threads adds 35M new sign-ups this month

Instagram's X rival, Threads, has seen 35 million new users sign up for the platform since Nov. 1, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told Axios.

https://www.axios.com/2024/11/26/exclusive-threads-adds-35m-new-signups-this-month?

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Meta joins the nuclear-powered AI fray

Facebook parent Meta is seeking developers that can bring nuclear reactors online starting in the early 2030s to support data centers and communities around them.

https://www.axios.com/2024/12/03/meta-facebook-nuclear-power-ai-data-centers?

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Instagram outage

Meta said Wednesday that it is close to resolving a technical issue that is causing a widespread outage of its apps, including Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp. "We're aware that a technical issue is impacting some users' ability to access our apps. We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience," Meta Newsroom said Wednesday afternoon. WhatsApp and Instagram both confirmed outages via X, and thousands of users reported they were unable to access Meta's apps. The outage lasted for more than three hours. By around 5:30 p.m. ET, Meta posted that it was "99% of the way there" to fully solving the issue.

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Meta eliminates fact-checking in latest bow to Trump

Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday announced changes to content moderation on Facebook and Instagram long sought by conservatives. Incoming President Donald Trump said the new approach was “probably” due to threats he made against the technology mogul.

https://apnews.com/article/meta-facts-trump-musk-community-notes-413b8495939a058ff2d25fd23f2e0f43?

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The information gods

Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios

Three massive, concurrent tectonic shifts are reordering in dramatic ways how America and the world will get, and consume, information in the years ahead, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write in a "Behind the Curtain" column: Trust in traditional media is vanishing. Where people are getting information has shattered into dozens of ecosystems. The world's most powerful social platforms — X, Facebook, Instagram — no longer police speech or information. Why it matters: In this new information world order, the people with the largest platforms and followings hold more power than ever in shaping reality. That's a seismic shift in how realities are formed in real time. Meta's decision to dial back fact-checking, announced yesterday, captures the sea change. A few short years ago, Twitter (before it was X), Facebook and Instagram had robust teams monitoring news and information — and pulling down posts that were hateful or deemed fake or misinformation. On top of that, news organizations had more credibility than today — allowing them both to expose misinformation, and also help correct it for the public. Now, the platforms' fact-checking teams have been dismantled, and traditional media is more delegitimized with a lot of consumers. While that was happening, the common window through which most Americans learned about the country and the world — TV, newspapers, radio — was shattered into dozens of shards of glass, based on consumer's personal preferences. So as President-elect Trump — a huge beneficiary of this new reality — takes office, the way we get informed has been upended in ways most have not fully reckoned with. 📈 Rising powers: Elon Musk (211 million followers on X), Mark Zuckerberg (118 million followers on Facebook, 15 million on Instagram) and others running the biggest, most influential platforms, and attracting the biggest personal followings. Trump has 97 million followers on X, if he ever returns in earnest. Plus his posts from his own platform, Truth Social (8.5 million followers), are instantly mirrored and amplified on X by official Trump accounts, fan accounts and news organizations. New media entities, especially on the right, benefit from the new dynamics. Any media company or person with a big following that trusts them to help make sense of the world around them (the mission of Axios). Tech execs tell us this shifting reality presents new opportunities for trusted names in media to help readers navigate the information landscape. Most worrisome, malicious actors who want to spread misinformation at scale with scant policing. Russia, China and others are quite adept at this and now face less resistance. 🧠 Reality check: Trump, Musk, and Zuckerberg are beneficiaries — but are proactive architects, not passive winners. 👀 Eye on the prize: Musk is trying to use this power to shape public opinion in the U.S., Britain and Germany in ways that help his political and business interests. Musk and Trump are of one mind on most topics — giving each more power. Zuckerberg is basically using the Musk playbook: Align with and back Trump, make plain his company is moving in a more MAGA-friendly direction, and stop policing his platforms in ways that bother either Trump or his supporters. Friends of Zuckerberg tell us this is what he long wanted to do, but felt he couldn't for internal and external reasons. Now it's easy. Beyond replacing fact-checking, Meta also said it will bring back more political content to its platforms and end restrictions on certain topics "out of touch with mainstream discourse," Zuckerberg said in his announcement video, "like immigration and gender." It also will adjust filters scanning for policy violations to tackle only illegal and "high severity" violations. Those include topics like terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud and scams. The company's U.S. content review team will move to Texas from California. Zuckerberg said that will help Meta "build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams." X last year announced the creation of a safety unit in Texas. 🔮 What to watch: One company struggling in this new environment is The Washington Post, which is bleeding talent and facing an internal revolt. We hear Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns The Post, wants to make it a publication for "all of America," with a heavy emphasis on social media, not traditional media popularity. Relatedly, The Post said yesterday that it'll abandon longtime efforts to promote its scoops to TV and other legacy outlets, to expand "beyond traditional media to reach new audiences." Why it matters to you: The burden now falls on you to find sources of information you trust for reliable truth. That means better scrutinizing not only the publications you choose, but the individuals you follow on social media. That's a lot to ask — but it's the new necessity. Share this column ... Axios' Sara Fischer and Scott Rosenberg contributed reporting.   Meta Meta announced sweeping changes to how it moderates content on Facebook and Instagram, including getting rid of fact checkers and replacing them with user-generated "community notes," similar to Elon Musk's X. "Fact checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday. "What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it's gone too far." Zuckerberg, however, acknowledged a "tradeoff" in the new policy, noting more harmful content will appear on the platform as a result of the changes. The company also quietly updated its hateful conduct policy, adding new types of content users can post, effective immediately.

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Facebook Fact Checks Were Never Going to Save Us. They Just Made Liberals Feel Better.

In a shameless act of genuflection toward the incoming Trump administration, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that his social media platforms — which include Facebook and Instagram — will be getting rid of fact-checking partners and replacing them with a “community notes” model like that found on X. 

https://theintercept.com/2025/01/07/facebook-fact-check-mark-zuckerberg-trump/?

My Ban From X Is About One Simple Thing: Elon Musk Controlling the Flow of Information

Elon Musk banned me from X for my journalism. No one should be surprised about it in this era, when the prevailing view in Silicon Valley is “Free speech for me but not for thee.”

https://theintercept.com/2025/01/08/x-twitter-elon-musk-ban-adrian-dittmann/?

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Meta kills DEI programs

Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios

Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan he's "optimistic" about President-elect Trump — while also repositioning Meta to make inroads with Trump. "I think he just wants America to win," Zuckerberg said on an episode of Rogan's podcast that dropped today. 📌 In an internal announcement first obtained by Axios' Mike Allen and Sara Fischer, Meta today said it's ending major diversity programs, including in hiring, training and picking suppliers. The memo from Janelle Gale, V.P. of human resources, said: "The legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing." The moves came just three days after Meta ended many of its fact-checking and content-moderation activities on Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Meta last week promoted Joel Kaplan, a prominent Republican, to chief global affairs officer, and added UFC president and CEO Dana White, a top Trump ally, to its board. Meta is one of several tech companies that pledged $1 million to Trump's inauguration. 🦊 What they're saying: Kaplan told Fox News Digital this afternoon that the moves are "ultimately about doing what's best for our company, and ensuring that we are serving everyone and building teams with the most talented people." "It's clear that there's a shift on this issue from a policy and legal perspective, and we anticipate that will happen even more moving forward," Kaplan said. "And we want to ensure our programs are in a long-term and sustainable position." Read Meta's memo ... Go deeper. Meta's make-up-with-MAGA map Meta's Mark Zuckerberg has outlined a new template for companies to make up with President-elect Trump and MAGA, Axios' Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei write in a "Behind the Curtain" column. Why it matters: Meta did this with a methodical striptease over nine days, capturing massive public and MAGA attention. "This is speaking Trump's love language," a transition source told us. 🔎 Behind the scenes: Zuckerberg had been considering some of the moves for years. Almost all had been in the works for months. But sources tell us Meta deliberately packaged them all up for detonation over nine days to maximize the pop for Trump. "It's hard to break through in this media environment," said a source familiar with the strategy. "It sends a signal." Here's the Meta formula: Put a Trump friend on your board (Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White). Promote a prominent Republican as your chief global affairs officer (Joel Kaplan, succeeding liberal-friendly Nick Clegg, president of global affairs). Align your philosophy with Trump's on a big-ticket public issue (free speech over fact-checking). Announce your philosophical change on Fox News, hoping Trump is watching. In this case, he was. "Meta, Facebook, I think they've come a long way," Trump said at a Mar-a-Lago news conference, adding of Kaplan's appearance on the "Fox and Friends" curvy couch: "The man was very impressive." Take a big public stand on a favorite issue for Trump and MAGA (rolling back DEI programs). Amplify that stand in an interview with Fox News Digital. (Kaplan again!) Go on Joe Rogan's podcast and blast President Biden for censorship. And light up social media with all the fireworks. Between the lines: Love it or hate it, the strategy seemed to work brilliantly. Trump praised Meta. Rogan hailed Zuck. House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who has aggressively investigated Big Tech, said he hopes other companies "follow the lead of X and Meta in upholding freedom of speech online." 🖼️ The big picture: Every company in America is watching. We can expect some to copy Zuckerberg — after Elon Musk showed the way. Shifts this fast are rare. And rarely isolated. The bottom line: Alex Bruesewitz — CEO of X Strategies LLC, and trusted adviser to the Trump campaign on alternative media — told us companies are either "a. Finally recognizing that 'wokeness' is a cancer, or b. Strategically adapting to the political climate and pandering to Republicans now that we are in power." "Only time will tell which is the true motivation," Bruesewitz said. "Regardless, MAGA is winning and will continue to win!" Keep reading ... Axios' Zachary Basu contributed reporting. 🗞️ Go deeper: Wall Street Journal front-page story today, "CEOs Kill Policies Before Inauguration: Diversity, climate initiatives gutted" (gift link). 👀 Meta's pivot will be hard to match     Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios   After Mark Zuckerberg's embrace of President-elect Trump, Silicon Valley is watching to see whether a whole row of tech dominoes is about to fall in the same direction, Axios managing editor Scott Rosenberg writes. Some early signs: Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon have lined up to give $1 million each to the inauguration. (Apple's donation came personally from CEO Tim Cook.) Amazon put $40 million behind a Melania Trump documentary. 🥊 Reality check: Zuckerberg, unlike his rival CEOs, has absolute voting control of his company. As he said in his three-hour conversation with Joe Rogan: "Because I control our company, I have the benefit of not having to convince the board not to fire me." None of the other members of tech's trillion-dollar club can move with the same speed or independence, even if they wanted to. Keep reading.

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Leaked Meta Rules: Users Are Free to Post “Mexican Immigrants Are Trash!” or “Trans People Are Immoral”

Meta is now granting its users new freedom to post a wide array of derogatory remarks about races, nationalities, ethnic groups, sexual orientations, and gender identities, training materials obtained by The Intercept reveal.

https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/facebook-instagram-meta-hate-speech-content-moderation/?

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📱 Meta would be TikTok ban's big winner

Data: eMarketer. ("Other social" includes Snapchat, Linkedin, Pinterest, Reddit and X. "Other channels" includes display, search and retail ads. "Connected TV" doesn't include YouTube.) Chart: Axios Visuals If TikTok is banned, more than half of the ad dollars spent on the platform in the U.S. would go to Meta and Google-owned properties, Axios' Sara Fischer writes, based on new projections from eMarketer. Meta and Google have invested heavily in their short-video rival products, Reels and Shorts, positioning them to take advantage. Meta's Instagram and Facebook would eat up a combined 40% of TikTok's ad revenues, according to the projections. ⚖️ What to watch: For now, the ban seems likely. The Supreme Court's arguments Friday led court watchers to expect it will uphold the ban law. China has indicated for months that it wouldn't let ByteDance sell TikTok to a U.S. company to skirt a ban. 👀 Plot twist: A Bloomberg exclusive last evening said Chinese officials are discussing the sale of TikTok's U.S. operation to Elon Musk if the company fails to fend off a ban. TikTok called the report "pure fiction." Go deeper: What'll happen to TikTok this Sunday, when a ban could kick in.

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RedNote app

As the clock ticks down on a US ban on TikTok, a growing number of American social media users are flocking to another China-based app called Xiaohongshu — also known as RedNote. The app surged to the top position in Apple's US App Store on Tuesday amid talks that TikTok could potentially go offline in the US this week. Many American users have said they joined RedNote as an act of defiance against Washington's move to ban TikTok due to its ties to China. "We're just going to a new Chinese app," one user said on Xiaohongshu, which has garnered more than 45,000 likes. Within two days, more than 700,000 new users have joined RedNote, Reuters reported.