After spending the weeks main as much as Election Day following Kamala Harris on her marketing campaign path, billionaire Mark Cuban has determined to place his toes up and take a break from politics following Donald Trump’s return to the White Home. The Shark Tank investor and Dallas Mavericks minority proprietor additionally deleted his posts on X in regards to the vice chairman.
“Just an FYI. Don’t expect any politics or speculation about what might happen for a while. I’m sure there will be plenty to comment on when the time comes,” Cuban mentioned in a Tuesday BlueSky put up.
Although he didn’t financially help Harris’s presidential marketing campaign, Cuban was an outspoken supporter of the vice chairman, whom he believed would make a “better president” than Trump. Cuban has sharply criticized Trump’s proposal for steep tariffs and lack of skill to dive within the “nitty-gritty” of insurance policies. However Cuban insisted his spring cleansing on X, the place he scrubbed mentions of his help for Harris, was nothing greater than routine.
“I’ve been deleting posts from twitter for more than 10 years,” he informed Fortune in an e-mail. “Where were you when I deleted posts about players the Mavs have traded lol.”
“It’s a non event,” he added.
However Cuban has made a contemporary begin for himself on social media, transferring away from posting on X—the place CEO and proprietor Elon Musk has intensely pushed his help for Trump—and as a substitute posting extra incessantly on BlueSky. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey developed that platform and opened it to most people final February. Previous to his Tuesday posts on the app, Cuban hadn’t posted on BlueSky since July 2023.
“Hello Less Hateful World,” he wrote on the platform Tuesday.
Greener grass, bluer skies
Cuban joins 14.5 million different BlueSky customers, because the app balloons in reputation following the election and a mass exodus from X. Over 700,000 others have joined BlueSky up to now week. Three months in the past, the app had 6.18 million customers; a month in the past, it grew to 10.85 million customers. Equally, Meta’s X various Threads surpassed 275 million month-to-month customers earlier this month after launching in July 2023.
In the meantime, X has hemorrhaged 2.4 million customers within the UK from September 2024 to this yr. Within the U.S., energetic customers on Musk’s platform have fallen by 20% in a 16-month interval, in line with knowledge from Similarweb. The Guardian introduced that it might cease posting on its official editorial accounts on the platform given “far-right conspiracy theories and racism.” The publication wrote that the U.S. Presidential Election underscored what it had lengthy contemplated: “that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse.”
The shift in the direction of BlueSky and Threads coincides with X’s well-documented proclivity towards spreading misinformation. Musk’s X posts spreading lies about election safety—together with faulty claims that sure poll machines have been switching votes—have been considered 1.2 billion occasions and weren’t fact-checked by the app’s Neighborhood Notes function, in line with August knowledge from the Middle for Countering Digital Hate. Musk’s attachment to Trump has strengthened for the reason that election, with the X CEO being appointed the co-head of the newly created Division of Authorities Effectivity, cementing the monthslong courtship between Musk and the subsequent U.S. president.
The migration away from X has, in flip, created an internet utopia for left-leaning customers who understand BlueSky as a friendlier, extra accepting platform, in line with Axel Bruns, social media researcher at Queensland College of Expertise in Brisbane, Australia.
“It’s become a refuge for people who want to have the kind of social media experience that Twitter used to provide, but without all the far-right activism, the misinformation, the hate speech, the bots and everything else,” he informed the Guardian.
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