You'll be devastated to learn that Don Lemon is leaving X. He explained his reasons in a little video.

Here's why I'm leaving Twitter... pic.twitter.com/VIope68L2k

— Don Lemon (@donlemon) November 13, 2024

Also today, the Guardian announced it would stop posting on X.

We wanted to let readers know that we will no longer post on any official Guardian editorial accounts on the social media site X (formerly Twitter). We think that the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives and that resources could be better used promoting our journalism elsewhere.

This is something we have been considering for a while given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism. The US presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: 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 explanation goes on to say that the Guardian will still include posts from X in stories and their reporters will still use X to gather information, they just don't want to be sullied by using it to promote their work. 

This hot new trend goes beyond a couple of media outlets. X rival Bluesky is growing as dejected liberals flee for a safer bubble.

Bluesky gained more than 700,000 new users in the last week and now has more than 14.5 million users total, Bluesky COO Rose Wang confirmed to The Verge. The “majority” of the new users on the decentralized social network are from the US, Wang says. The app is currently the number two free social networking app in the US App Store, only trailing Meta’s Threads.

Despite this, Bluesky remains pretty small with just shy of 15 million users. For comparison, Threads has 275 million monthly users and X has about 611 million. But again, the point of heading to Bluesky isn't to be on the biggest platform it's to find a safe space for liberals.

The accounts created on Bluesky this week, many of which are left-leaning, shared cat videos alongside their hopes that the platform might offer a reprieve from the misinformation and hateful speech that have swirled on X since Mr. Musk’s takeover.

New or freshly active users on the platform include celebrities (the rapper Flavor Flav, the author John Green), Democratic political figures (Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Chasten Buttigieg, husband of Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary) and media personalities (Mehdi Hasan, Molly Jong-Fast).

“Hello Less Hateful World,” Mark Cuban, the billionaire and Kamala Harris surrogate, posted on Tuesday.

There are plenty of people in the left-leaning media eager to push this trend. Slate published a story promoting Bluesky titled "Sick of X and Elon Musk? This App Might Be for You." Gizmodo published a story yesterday recommending that it was time for people (meaning liberals) to leave the site.

Yesterday a friend of mine, a defense reporter in the Pacific, asked a simple question. “Do I have to actually start using Bluesky now?” I told him that I thought it was time. A lot of people seem to feel that way.

As with the Guardian, this reporter isn't really leaving so much as he's self-muting.

Thanks to work, I need to keep one foot in X’s door, unfortunately. I cover national security issues and a lot of that stuff still plays out on X. Sometimes CENTCOM will tweet out a picture of a nuclear submarine just to let everyone know it has nukes in the Middle East, for example. Diplomacy between foreign countries, annoyingly, still plays out on X. Politicians, especially Trump-aligned ones, love pumping out weird messages on the platform.

This isn't the first time the left has attempted to leave X en masse in order to hurt Elon Musk. Needless to say it didn't work last time and many of those people still have accounts on X. I'm not convinced this new attempt will be any more effective but as one site suggested, abandoning X is the digital equivalent of leaving the country after the election. You can make a path to a digital bubble full of likeminded liberals without leaving your desk.

My guess is that Bluesky will survive as a left-wing boutique for a while but over time mobs of woke activists will gear up the cancel culture because that's why many of these people go on social media. The congenial atmosphere will wane until the site become a hotbed of accusations and recriminations, just like every other left-wing organization has in the past five years. The one thing liberals can't leave behind when they flee to the new bubble is themselves.