Not surprisingly, many large, left-leaning social media accounts recently joined Bluesky, but new analysis from the Pew Research Center attempts to quantify the shift.
This is an update to the Pew News Influencer Report released in November 2024, which excludes the Bluesman numbers. The report focuses on a relatively small 500 influencers who have over 100,000 followers on at least one major platform and regularly publish information about current affairs.
For the Blues-centric update, Pew looks at those same influencers (as opposed to accounts that might have found numerous viewers entirely on the Blues), and sees February/March, with 43% of them having an account on the Blues. More than half of these accounts (51%) were created after the 2024 presidential election.
There is a big disagreement between the influencers on the right and left, with 69% of the left-leaning accounts (clearly identified as liberal or Democratic accounts and expressing support for Kamala Harris or Joe Biden before the presidential election), while it only jumped to Bruinsky before the presidential election, while conservatives only 15%.
This movement doesn’t have to come at the expense of X (formerly Twitter). Although X boss Elon Musk’s alliance with current President Donald Trump appears to drive new users to Bluesky, 82% of influencers tracked by Pew still have an account on X, just slightly below 85% of summer 2025.
In other words, even if left-leaning influencers dipped their toes into the Blues, most (87%) did not give up on X. Pew also said that most influencers continue to post more regularly on X, rather than on Bluesky.
However, the Blues activity does seem to be raising the bets – Bruinsky’s influencer count actually grew from 54% in the first week of January to 66% in the last week of March.
