Australian media outlets have been slow to shift to Bluesky, the latest alternative to the social media app X, formerly known as Twitter.
Bluesky, a microblogging social media site that mimics much of X’s aesthetic and functionality, complete with a one-dimensional logo of a blue butterfly in the same shade of blue as Twitter’s iconic bird, has seen over 20 million users sign up, many of them flocking to the platform after the results of the US election.
Some Australian media outlets have pulled back from X after advertisers abandoned the platform over tech billionaire Elon Musk’s handling of the site, but alternative options struggling to gain traction has presented a challenge for news organisations.
The only major Australian news outlet to have joined Bluesky at the time of writing is Guardian Australia, after the company announced it was leaving X globally following the US election.
The outlet cited the “often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform”, and that it had “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”.
While the ABC drew back its presence on X in August 2023, abandoning the majority of its accounts while citing an uptick in “toxic interactions” on the platform, Crikey understands there are no imminent plans for the national broadcaster to join Bluesky or make any changes to its presence on X.
Crikey contacted a number of other Australian media outlets to ask what proportion of online traffic they were seeing from Bluesky, whether they planned to join the platform, whether they still saw X as productive or useful, and whether they had made any change to how they used X since the Musk acquisition or the US election. Crikey also asked whether outlets had any plans to leave X.
Australian outlets have lagged significantly behind their international counterparts on a shift to Bluesky — international newswire Reuters, as well as American outlets The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, NPR, The Atlantic, and Bloomberg have all joined. British outlets Financial Times, The Times and The Independent have also all joined, as has the Qatari based Al Jazeera.
An SBS spokesperson said that traffic from both X and Bluesky represented a “very small percentage of our traffic”, and while “in terms of developments in the space [they] are following the conversation closely but have not made any business-wide decisions regarding either platform”.
Youth outlet 6 News Australia has also joined Bluesky. Its managing director Leonardo Puglisi told Crikey that his company’s choice to join Bluesky was “initially to reserve the handle when we first joined, but seeing a bit of an exodus in recent days, it’s clear there’s an audience on there and we’ll happily take advantage of that when there’s relatively few Australian news outlets there”.
“Twitter is still very useful and, by far, the platform with our largest following. We have not changed how we’ve used it since the Musk takeover or the US election — for us, the only thing that changed was the removal of our non-paid verification check … 6 News has absolutely no plans to leave Twitter,” Puglisi said.
Crikey readers’ editor Crystal Andrews said Crikey has chosen to join Bluesky as an “experiment”, reflecting that “with a small team we can be nimble and try new things quickly”.
“In the aftermath of the US election, I could see many of our most engaged Twitter followers had moved across to Bluesky so it made sense for us to experiment there,” Andrews said, adding that Crikey will continue to post on X for “the foreseeable future”.
“[Bluesky] is referring a significant amount of traffic for the size of our following on the platform and the fact that we have only been actively posting for a little over a week”.
The Nine-owned The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Australian Financial Review declined to comment, while The Daily Telegraph, The Australian, The Daily Aus, Network 10 and Seven West Media (which publishes The West Australian and The Nightly) did not respond for comment in time for publication.
Musk, who purchased Twitter in October 2022 for US$44 billion, featured prominently in the victorious Donald Trump campaign and has been announced as one of Trump’s appointees for the newly minted Department of Government Efficiency (or DOGE, a nod to the cryptocurrency which has soared in value following the election). The platform has been criticised following the Musk acquisition for allowing far-right conspiracy theories, racism and abuse to fester.
Bluesky, itself initially an open-source project conceived at Twitter by former CEO Jack Dorsey, was spun off into its own company in 2022 following the Musk acquisition. Current Bluesky CEO Jay Graber said in October that Musk’s purchase “changed everything” for the company, sending its staff “off on our own”.
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