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 ft 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 vp.
“Simply an FYI. Don’t count on any politics or hypothesis about what would possibly occur for some time. I’m positive there shall be loads to touch upon when the time comes,” Cuban mentioned in a Tuesday BlueSky submit.
Although he didn’t financially help Harris’s presidential marketing campaign, Cuban was an outspoken supporter of the vp, whom he believed would make a “higher president” than Trump. Cuban has sharply criticized Trump’s proposal for steep tariffs and lack of capability 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 greater than 10 years,” he advised Fortune in an e-mail. “The place have been you once I deleted posts about gamers the Mavs have traded lol.”
“It’s a non occasion,” he added.
However Cuban has made a recent 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 an alternative posting extra steadily on BlueSky. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey developed that platform and opened it to most of the people final February. Previous to his Tuesday posts on the app, Cuban hadn’t posted on BlueSky since July 2023.
“Hi there Much 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 recognition 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 12 months. Within the U.S., energetic customers on Musk’s platform have fallen by 20% in a 16-month interval, in keeping with information 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 poisonous media platform and that its proprietor, Elon Musk, has been ready to make use of its affect to form political discourse.”
The shift in 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 inaccurate claims that sure poll machines have been switching votes—have been seen 1.2 billion occasions and weren’t fact-checked by the app’s Neighborhood Notes function, in keeping with August information 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 a web based utopia for left-leaning customers who understand BlueSky as a friendlier, extra accepting platform, in keeping with Axel Bruns, social media researcher at Queensland College of Expertise in Brisbane, Australia.
“It’s change into a refuge for individuals who need to have the sort of social media expertise that Twitter used to supply, however with out all of the far-right activism, the misinformation, the hate speech, the bots and all the pieces else,” he advised the Guardian.
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