• by Colin Kirkland , January 9, 2025

With Meta suddenly appealing to president-elect Donald Trump and loosening its content-moderation policies, Bluesky has announced a new funding push in an attempt to position itself as a “free speech” alternative to not only X, but Meta as well.

Earlier this week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the world that the social media giant will no longer be fact-checking content distributed on its platforms and apps, allowing for more discussion around “civic topics.” The announcement marked a complete reversal of Meta's previous commentary regarding plans to minimize the proliferation of political content.

In fact, Meta launched its app Threads under the belief that cutting out negative conversation topics -- especially under the umbrella of “politics” -- would be beneficial for its users.

It was a strategic move, considering Threads is a copycat app of Elon Musk's X, the app formerly known as Twitter.

But it was also a response to issues Meta faced in the past, with political in-app discussion stoking division among its users and leading to violent political events such as the attack on the Capitol in 2021.

Now that Trump has been reelected, however, Meta is bowing to the president-elect’s wishes, which align closely with Musk's “free speech” Community Note-based content-moderation approach.

X, too, has flipped its content strategy. While the platform's moderation policies remain the same, Musk recently announced an algorithmic shift away from political content in exchange for more positive, “informational/entertaining” content, despite Musk's personal history of harmful posts.

Bluesky, however, has stayed true to its original ethos, which involves keeping a safe distance from corrupt business interests while providing its users with a customizable, safer and more inclusive alternative to social platforms with X's content moderation model.

Which is why Bluesky is capitalizing on a pattern that continues to push millions of users to its app from X and now Meta.

According to a report from Business Insider, Bluesky's third funding round is still being finalized, but is valuing the platform at $700 million. The company last raised a $15 million Series A round in October of last year, and an $8 million seed round the year before that. after raising $15 million in Series A in October of last year.

With the rise of Musk and Trump, Bluesky has become more popular, growing its user base from 3 to 26 million over the course of the past year. Almost 12 million of those users joined the app over the month following Trump's presidential election win, during which Musk also endorsed the president-elect.

Bluesky says that its recent growth has been so rapid that it has been forced to add new servers for its million-plus new users per day. The company, which has remained transparent about its content-moderation processes, under the leadership of Twitter’s former trust and safety head Aaron Rodericks, has also been working to build out its user experience with new functionality like trending topicsand more.

As Bluesky continues on its quest to become the primary decentralized social media alternative to platforms aligning with the whims of Trump, it still faces an uphill battle, as Meta's Threads boasts 300 million monthly actives and, ironically, may benefit from the potentially upcoming over-politicized versions of Facebook and Instagram.