Left-leaning influencers embrace Bluesky without abandoning X, Pew says

It’s no shock that many large, left-leaning social media accounts have lately joined Bluesky — however a new analysis from the Pew Analysis Middle makes an attempt to quantify that shift.

This comes as an replace to Pew’s news influencer report launched in November 2024, which didn’t embody Bluesky in its numbers. The report centered on a comparatively small group of 500 influencers, all of whom have greater than 100,000 followers on at the least one main platform and submit often about present occasions.

For this Bluesky-centric replace, Pew checked out those self same influencers (versus accounts that will have discovered a giant viewers on Bluesky solely) and noticed that in February/March, 43% of them had an account on Bluesky. Simply over half (51%) of these accounts have been created after the 2024 presidential election.

There’s a giant divide between influencers on the proper and the left, with 69% of the left-leaning accounts (those that explicitly recognized as liberals or Democrats and expressed assist for Kamala Harris or Joe Biden earlier than the presidential election) making the soar to Bluesky, whereas solely 15% of the conservative ones did the identical.

This motion wasn’t essentially on the expense of X (previously Twitter). Whereas X proprietor Elon Musk’s alliance with now-President Donald Trump appeared to drive new users to Bluesky, 82% of the influencers tracked by Pew nonetheless had an account on X, down solely barely from 85% in summer season 2025.

In different phrases, even when left-leaning influencers are dipping their toes into Bluesky, most of them (87%) haven’t deserted X. Pew additionally says most influencers proceed to submit extra often on X than on Bluesky.

Nevertheless, Bluesky exercise does look like selecting up — the variety of influencers on Bluesky who’re truly posting grew from 54% within the first week of January to 66% within the final full week of March.