Annoyed with a slogan

Musk drives British X users to rival Bluesky

Musk had described a civil war in the UK as "inevitable".(Bild: AFP/Apu Gomes)

Elon Musk's handling of information about the recent riots in the UK is causing more and more British users to turn their backs on his short message service X. "In five of the past seven days, the UK has seen the highest number of new sign-ups worldwide," rival Bluesky announced on Tuesday.

This included several members of parliament. At the same time, the activity of British user accounts has increased by 60 percent, according to Bluesky.

War "inevitable"
Musk had recently come under fire for spreading misleading information about the riots via X. This included a post in which a civil war in the UK was described as "inevitable".

At the beginning of August, a fatal knife attack on three underage girls in the north-west of England triggered a wave of anti-Muslim violence by right-wing extremists. The suspected murderer had been falsely labeled as an Islamist migrant on the internet.

Competitors vie for users
Ever since Musk's chaotic takeover of the then still called Twitter platform X in the fall of 2022, numerous competitors have been vying for users looking for an alternative short messaging service.

One of them is Bluesky from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. According to the industry service Similarweb, his company had around 700,000 active users per month in July, while X has around 77 million. Another alternative is "Threads" from Facebook parent company Meta. The X challenger Mastodon comes from Germany.