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Elon Musk may have helped Donald Trump win the U.S. presidential election — but one of his companies is facing post-election losses.
The billionaire’s social media platform, X, formerly known as Twitter, set a U.S. web traffic record while also seeing its largest wave of deactivations on the day after the election, according to data from digital market intelligence company Similarweb. The company has been tracking deactivations on X since Musk took over the platform, and “Wednesday is the biggest exit we’ve seen over the last couple of years,” David Carr, an editor at Similarweb (SMWB+2.05%), told Quartz.
On November 6, more than 115,000 web visitors in the U.S. deactivated their X accounts, Similarweb found — “more than on any previous day of Elon Musk’s tenure, during which many users who disagreed with his politics or his style have threatened to leave the service.”
The same day, the platform had 46.5 million visits from within the U.S. — the most of any day in the past year, and 38% higher than an average day in the last few months, Similarweb said. X had previously set a U.S. traffic record of 42.3 million on Election Day, according to the data.
The company collected the data by tracking visits to a confirmation page that is displayed on X’s website when a user confirms an account deactivation. Similarweb said it does not have tracking for X users who deactivated their account through the mobile app.
Meanwhile, social media platform Bluesky saw its web traffic and daily active user count increase “dramatically in the week before the election, and then again after election day,” according to Similarweb. Bluesky, which is touted as an alternative to Twitter, saw more traffic “[f]or several days” around the election than another Twitter competitor, Instagram’s (META+0.29%) Threads, “which had not previously been the case,” Similarweb said.
On Tuesday, Bluesky announced that it has welcomed one million users since the U.S. presidential election.
Bluesky “prepared for the election from all sides,” it told Quartz, including with infrastructure, scaling, and trust and safety measures. The majority of new users are from the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., Bluesky said.
“Users have also been sharing feedback that they’re receiving more engagement (and higher-quality engagement) on Bluesky than on other platforms despite initially having more followers elsewhere, and most importantly, that they’re having fun,” a Bluesky spokesperson said.
X could not be reached for comment.
