In an effort to align with the Trump administration, Mark Zuckerberg started out the year by completely gutting fact checking and allowing for hate speech to be posted across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Some of the dangerous things that are now allowed include: “Black people are more violent than whites” and "A trans person isn't a he or she, it's an it."
Over on TikTok and in a great show of political theater, TikTok then went dark in the U.S. for 12 hours after being banned. Users could not access their apps, profiles, and it disappeared from all app stores in the U.S. Then the platform came online the next day and greeted users with a notification thanking President Trump for bringing them back online (even though he introduced this ban in the first place.)
These examples are not just isolated incidents of bad behavior from Silicon Valley CEOs. It is all a part of the scheme to maintain control over a massively impactful space — the internet — at the expense of user safety and experience.
Users are completely aware of this though, and finding ways to fight back. So much so, that people have participated in strikes and boycotts of the platforms, as well as deciding to leave platforms all together for other places. The greatest example of this in the past year has been the migration from X (formerly Twitter) to Bluesky. X has been steadily declining in both usability and safety since Elon Musk took over in 2022. People have been leaving the Musk-owned platform but it was the 2024 U.S. presidential election and the sheer volume of right-wing fueled disinformation and hate speech flooding X that really ignited a mass exodus from the platform to a new place, Bluesky. In November 2024, Bluesky had gained 15 million users. Now, as of March 3rd, they have doubled in size to nearly 33 million users.
Whether you are also ready to leave X behind or have questions about how to digitally migrate from one social platform to another place, this Digital Go Bag guide is for you.
While this is a practical guide for people who are packing their digital bags to leave places like X for Bluesky, we can’t ignore the impact that places like X have on our lives. With Elon Musk installing himself as Trump’s right-hand man, Amazon and OpenAI donating millions to Trump’s inaugural fund, and Meta gutted fact checking to align with the new administration — Big Tech is more ingrained in our everyday lives and systems than ever before and not in ways that prioritize people in our communities.
We have to understand that leaving X doesn’t get rid of the problems or the billionaires who own those platforms but don’t have our best interest in mind. We must still pay attention to them and find ways to fight the ideology & lies that get spread in those places and often turn into offline violence – in the streets or in the courts. And we must think: what have we learned from the harmful ways places like Facebook are run, that we don’t want to see in new places like Bluesky? There is an opportunity to influence new places so that all of our community building and organizing, no matter the issue, has safer digital homes.