Social media platform Bluesky has gained more than one million new users since the US presidential election, benefitting from an exodus of people unhappy with the direction of X under billionaire owner Elon Musk.

The micro-blogging site said on Wednesday that it had topped 15 million users, up from about nine million in September.

Started by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey in 2019, Bluesky has gained a reputation as a refuge for left-leaning users disaffected by X’s rightward turn under Musk’s stewardship.

Some Bluesky users have cited Musk’s alliance with US President-elect Donald Trump and a rise in hateful content on X as reasons for making the jump to the platform.

“Hello Less Hateful World,” billionaire Mark Cuban, who backed Vice President Kamala Harris during the election, posted on Tuesday.

On Wednesday, The Guardian newspaper announced it would no longer post content on X due to the “disturbing content” on the “toxic media platform”, including racism and conspiracy theories.

“The US presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse,” The Guardian said in a statement on its website.

“We think that the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives and that resources could be better used promoting our journalism elsewhere.”

Bluesky itself has played up its image as a sanctuary for disaffected liberals.

After it was reported that Musk would watch the election results with Trump, the platform posted on X that none of its team would be “sitting with a presidential candidate tonight and giving them direct access to control what you see online”.

X has experienced several waves of user exits since Musk took over the platform in October 2022, although the site still boasts a much bigger user base than Bluesky.

Some 115,000 US-based web visitors deactivated their X accounts on the day after the US election, the biggest single-day decline under Musk, according to internet traffic analyser Similarweb.