There’s a popular type of post-election post on Threads: Users saying they’re ditching X, the app known as Twitter before it was bought by Elon Musk, president-elect Donald Trump’s most high-profile supporter. If you use Threads, those posts have been inescapable over the past few days.
You’ll also see posts about celebrities and media figures who have quit X, like MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace. The former George W. Bush communication’s director said she deleted Twitter this week “as an act of self-preservation.”
The number of users cannot be quantified, but anecdotally, the trend was notable. NPR reporter Kai Ryssdal posted on Threads on Thursday that he was quitting like Wallace — but a few hours later, said he was “done with regular posting” on X, not completely deactivating his account.
Vanity Fair special correspondent Joe Hagan and Australian author Kirstin Ferguson also said they left X, despite their fairly large followings on the platform.
And then there’s the non-media X users who said they’re saying bye-bye to the app. “The resistance” to Trump and Musk, one user said, “starts now” on Threads. Another user said they quit because they didn’t want to help Musk’s “disinformation tool.” Here’s a taste of some of those posts:
The blowback to X comes after Trump beat Kamala Harris on Election Night and after Musk backed the Republican. Musk spent part of Election Night with Trump, after having spent $119 million to help him get elected. America PAC, Musk’s pro-Trump political action committee, included a picture of the tech exec in his “dark MAGA” hat on its website. The PAC listed a handful of top priorities, including free speech, safe cities and secure borders.
Musk also championed Trump over Harris on X in the months leading up to the election, and helped drive more voters in swing states like Pennsylvania, where he mobilized the Amish vote.
His unabashed Trump support, coupled with Trump winning, is why you’re seeing these posts on Threads pop up. Threads is owned by Meta, Facebook’s parent company. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s game plan for the 2024 election was to make his platforms less political than in years past, and he was among several tech leaders who were courting Trump in the months leading up to his Tuesday win.
At the same time, Vice President Harris wasn’t hurting for big money donors, either. Harris raised more than $1 billion after replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee in July. Her backers include Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. Overall, Forbes reported Harris had 83 billionaires backing her, compared to 52 billionaires who supported Trump.
If there is an X exodus underway, Musk doesn’t seem too worried about it. He posted on Thursday that the platform had “all-time high usage” on Election Day, with users spending 434.1 billion seconds on the app.