Bluesky said it has seen a jump in signups in the UK, in what could be a sign that Elon Musk’s controversial comments are leading people to search for alternatives to X.

Many high-profile figures have left X, formerly Twitter, following accusations that Elon Musk intensified national tensions after days of far-right rioting in Britain, sparked by online misinformation about the murder of three girls in northern England last month.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO hit out at government plans to introduce more robust online safety legislation, including better policing of illegal content on social media, after writing on X that “civil war is inevitable” in the UK.

Musk also took aim at the prime minister, Keir Starmer, labelling him a hypocrite for the government’s handling of the riots, and further amplified debunked claims spread by conspiracy theorists and populist politicians.

The result has been a steady stream of notable names leaving his social media platform in search of greener pastures. Among those to have already signed up for Bluesky are the Home Office minister Jess Philips, and Labour MP Lewis Atkinson, while others, including Noah Law, MP for St Austell and Newquay, have disabled their X accounts.

“For 5 out of the last 7 days, the UK had the most Bluesky signups of any country,” said Bluesky in a statement on Monday.

In July, Bluesky’s monthly active user base stood at about 688,568, a fraction of X’s base of 76.9 million, according to data from Similarweb, a digital market intelligence company.

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Although Bluesky has become the main competitor of X, other social media platforms with the same format will also reap the benefits of user migration. Among those will be Threads, the platform owned by Meta, and Mastadon, an open-source platform which claims to not serve ads or push profiles on users unlike larger platforms. 

For its part, Bluesky, created by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, is designed to be more transparent, and allows people outside of the company to see how it’s built and what is being developed.

This open approach is proving popular with X users who are rapidly becoming disillusioned with the social media behemoth. According to recent research from Savanta, 29% of X users believe changes to the platform under Musk have made the platform worse, with three in ten saying they were planning to leave.

The troubles for X don’t stop at losing its user base, either, with the company now facing a legal challenge under GDPR laws over the company’s use of personal data from 60 million European users to train its AI large language model ‘Grok’.