It’s no surprise that many big, left-leaning social media accounts have recently joined Bluesky — but a new analysis from the Pew Research Center attempts to quantify that shift.
This comes as an update to Pew’s news influencer report released in November 2024, which did not include Bluesky in its numbers. The report focused on a relatively small group of 500 influencers, all of whom have more than 100,000 followers on at least one major platform and post regularly about current events.
For this Bluesky-centric update, Pew looked at those same influencers (as opposed to accounts that may have found a big audience on Bluesky exclusively) and saw that in February/March, 43% of them had an account on Bluesky. Just over half (51%) of those accounts were created after the 2024 presidential election.
There’s a big divide between influencers on the right and the left, with 69% of the left-leaning accounts (the ones that explicitly identified as liberals or Democrats and expressed support for Kamala Harris or Joe Biden before the presidential election) making the jump to Bluesky, while only 15% of the conservative ones did the same.
This movement wasn’t necessarily at the expense of X (formerly Twitter). While X owner Elon Musk’s alliance with now-President Donald Trump seemed to drive new users to Bluesky, 82% of the influencers tracked by Pew still had an account on X, down only slightly from 85% in summer 2025.
In other words, even if left-leaning influencers are dipping their toes into Bluesky, most of them (87%) haven’t abandoned X. Pew also says most influencers continue to post more regularly on X than on Bluesky.
However, Bluesky activity does appear to be picking up — the number of influencers on Bluesky who are actually posting grew from 54% in the first week of January to 66% in the last full week of March.
Keep reading the article on Tech Crunch
An AI-powered system could soon take responsibility for evaluating the potential harms and privacy risks of up to 90% of updates made to Meta apps like Instagram and WhatsApp, according to internal documents reportedly viewed by NPR.
NPR says a 2012 agreement between Facebook (now Meta) and the Federal Trade Commission requires the company to conduct privacy reviews of its products, evaluating the risks of any potential updates. Until now, those reviews have been largely conducted by human evaluators.
Under the new system, Meta reportedly said product teams will be asked to fill out a questionaire about their work, then will usually receive an “instant decision” with AI-identified risks, along with requirements that an update or feature must meet before it launches.
This AI-centric approach would allow Meta to update its products more quickly, but one former executive told NPR it also creates “higher risks,” as “negative externalities of product changes are less likely to be prevented before they start causing problems in the world.”
In a statement, Meta seemed to confirm that it’s changing its review system, but it insisted that only “low-risk decisions” will be automated, while “human expertise” will still be used to examine “novel and complex issues.”
Keep reading the article on Tech Crunch
Welcome back to Week in Review! We’ve got a ton of stories for you this week, including a new AI-powered browser from Arc; not one but TWO hacks; Gemini email summaries; and much more. Have a great weekend!
Look out, Google: AI-powered search engine Perplexity released Perplexity Labs, which gives Pro subscribers a tool that can craft reports, spreadsheets, dashboards, and more. Perplexity Labs can conduct research and analysis using tools like web search, code execution, and chart and image creation to craft reports and visualizations. All in around 10 minutes. We haven’t had a chance to test it, and knowing the shortcomings of AI, I’m sure not everything will come out flawlessly. But it certainly sounds pretty awesome.
Luckey’s luck: The feud between Oculus founder Palmer Luckey and Mark Zuckerberg appears to be over: The pair announced a collaboration between Facebook and Luckey’s company Anduril to build extended reality (XR) devices for the U.S. military. The product family they’re building is called EagleEye, which will be an ecosystem of devices.
Not awesome: We don’t definitively know whether AI is beginning to take over roles previously done by humans. But a recent World Economic Forum survey found that 40% of employers plan to cut staff where AI can automate tasks. That can’t be good.
This is TechCrunch’s Week in Review, where we recap the week’s biggest news. Want this delivered as a newsletter to your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.
Everyone’s making a browser: The Browser Company said this week that it’s considering selling or open sourcing its browser, Arc Browser, to focus on a new AI-powered browser called Dia. And it’s not the only one! Opera also said it’s building a new AI-focused browser, and Perplexity teased its browser, Comet, a few months ago.
At last: iPad users, rejoice! You can now talk to all your international friends with the new iPad-specific version of WhatsApp. Meta says that users will be able to take advantage of iPadOS multitasking features, such as Stage Manager, Split View, and Slide Over.
Oh, great: LexisNexis Risk Solutions, a data broker that uses personal information to help companies spot risks and fraud, reported a security breach affecting more than 364,000 people. A LexisNexis spokesperson told us that an unknown hacker accessed the company’s GitHub account, and the stolen data includes names, dates of birth, phone numbers, postal and email addresses, Social Security numbers, and driver’s license numbers.
And another one: Hackers reportedly accessed the personal phone of White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, obtaining contact information used to impersonate her and contact other high-ranking officials. It seems that AI was used to impersonate her voice.
Can it cook my meals? Gmail users no longer have to tap an option to summarize an email with AI. The AI will now automatically summarize the content when needed, without requiring user interaction. That means you have to opt out if you don’t want Gemini summarizing your stuff.
Billion with a B: General Catalyst has invested $1 billion into Grammarly, the 16-year-old writing assistant startup. Grammarly will use the new funds for its sales and marketing efforts, freeing up existing capital to make strategic acquisitions.
In the heights: Tinder is testing a new feature that will allow people to add a “height preference” in their search for love. This isn’t a hard filter, Tinder says, as it won’t actually block or exclude profiles but instead inform recommendations.
10 years in the making: Carma Technology, which was formed in 2007 by SOSV Ventures founder Sean O’Sullivan, filed a lawsuit earlier this year against Uber, alleging the company infringed on five of its patents. The lawsuit is fairly new, but the allegations go back almost a decade.
Keep reading the article on Tech Crunch
Elon Musk’s X experienced an outage on Friday, according to user reports and crowdsourced data from sites like Downdetector. From what TechCrunch staff has witnessed firsthand, the X website and app still loaded, but various features were not functioning properly, and entire feeds — like X’s algorithmic For You feed — didn’t load any content.
Others reported that photos weren’t loading, X’s banking service XMoney wasn’t working, the timeline was bare, posts weren’t publishing, and search wasn’t returning results, among other things.
Based on the timing of the user reports, the outage and errors seem to have begun just before 4 p.m. ET on Friday and seem to be resolving as of the time of writing.
During the outage, thousands of users submitted reports to Downdetector, and others more directly complained in X posts and on other social networks, like Bluesky and Threads.
This was the second outage for X in just over a week, as the service also failed on May 22, when X experienced a number of issues over a 24-hour period. During that time, messages wouldn’t load, timelines wouldn’t update, and some posts couldn’t be seen without refreshing the webpage.
The current outage may be short-lived. We noticed that some features seemed to either be intermittently working, or worked on X’s mobile app but not on the desktop, for instance. Then, people began reporting that the service seemed to have come back up.
The X Developer API v2 is still showing degraded status, however.
Just ahead of the outage, X began rolling out its new DM feature, XChat, into beta after pausing encrypted DMs as it worked to make improvements. It’s not clear if any of these changes impacted X’s stability, and the company no longer responds to press inquiries since Musk took ownership.
Keep reading the article on Tech Crunch
X’s new DM feature, XChat, has begun rolling out to beta testers. Some X users who pay for the platform’s subscription product have reported that they can access XChat, while reverse engineer Nima Owji confirmed to TechCrunch that the new messaging system appears to be ready to ship.
XChat is intended to be a more robust version of X’s existing DM (direct messages) feature, which is a holdover from before Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.
Some features that have been rumored to be part of XChat include group messages, end-to-end encryption, vanishing mode, the ability to mark messages as unread, and file sharing. Messages also appear to be secured behind a four-digit passcode.
X announced on Thursday that it was pausing work on its encrypted DM feature, which could be related to the impending release of XChat, since this new system would render the existing DM interface obsolete. Paid subscribers on X have had access to a limited version of encrypted messaging for two years.
In the years since he bought Twitter, Musk has spoken on numerous occasions about his ambitions to make a Signal-like messaging service embedded into X. If XChat really is gearing up for public use, then this news could represent Musk’s follow-through on that goal.
Keep reading the article on Tech Crunch