Pew Finds BlueSky’s ‘News Influencers’ Aren’t Influencing Anyone

Following last fall’s U.S. presidential election, a wave of left-leaning X accounts—some of which self-proclaimed themselves as “news influencers”—announced their plans to abandon Elon Musk’s social media platform in favor of the woke Bluesky platform.

A new Pew Research Center analysis of 500 top news influencers (each with over 100,000 followers) shows that Bluesky’s adoption surged after the 2024 presidential election, rising from 21% to 43% by March 2025. Nearly half of the Bluesky accounts were created after the election, with a sizeable spike in the final weeks of November.

Despite Bluesky’s rise as a digital ‘safe space’ for progressives, X remains one of the most influential platforms for online conversation:

Many news influencers on Bluesky joined during the platform’s recent wave of growth. About half of sampled news influencers with a Bluesky account (51%) created that account after the 2024 election, including 42% who did so in the last three weeks of November 2024.

Even with Bluesky’s growth, X remains popular among the 2024 sample of news influencers. As of early 2025, 82% have an account there, about the same share as in summer 2024 (85%).

And most of these news influencers with a Bluesky account also have an X account. Only 6% of the influencers we studied have a Bluesky account but not an X account, while 37% have both. The largest share (46%) have an X account but not a Bluesky account.

Pew’s findings will disappoint rage-fueled leftist news influencers: 

 At the same time, most news influencers across the political spectrum have not left X. Three-quarters of left-leaning news influencers have an X account, as do 87% of right-leaning news influencers and 83% of those without a clear political orientation.

Pew also noted that most influencers continue to post regularly on X rather than on Bluesky.

The left relentlessly tried to dismantle X, with their army of PR propagandists staging a mass exodus. Months later, realizing Bluesky has zero influence at all, these crazed leftists have returned to X.