As advertisers cut spend and experts rebuild networks, Twitter/X’s professional trust is sliding—while Bluesky emerges as the go-to venue for specialist, research-driven discussion.
Marketers, journalists, and scientists are all signaling the same thing: professional trust in X (formerly Twitter) keeps sliding, and Bluesky is becoming the place where experts actually talk shop.
A global Kantar survey finds a record pullback in ad spend on X for 2025, with trust in its brand-safety at just 4% of marketers—the lowest among major platforms.
Multiple outlets report that more than a quarter of advertisers plan to cut spend, citing brand-safety and content concerns. That’s not a vibes check; it’s a budget line item moving off the platform.
“Professional trust” isn’t a fuzzy metric—here’s what moved
Three datapoints drew a red underline under X’s professional credibility this year:
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Advertiser sentiment: Kantar’s latest read shows the biggest recorded pullback yet, with trust in ads on X falling from 22% (2022) to 12% (2024), and only 4% of marketers calling X brand-safe—a stark outlier versus peers. In aggregate, a net 26% intend to reduce spending in 2025. For B2B and media brands, ad trust is a proxy for overall professional confidence in the product.
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Brand value & safety optics: Brand Finance describes a prolonged collapse in X’s brand value since 2022, while regulators flag slimmer safety teams. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner reported 30% cuts to trust & safety staff (including steep reductions in moderators and safety engineers) since the Musk takeover—changes that directly shape how professionals perceive risk.
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Newsroom behavior: Journalists still monitor X, but usage patterns are shifting. A 2025 survey (U.S./U.K.) found 25% of journalists using Bluesky—second only to X—and rising. When the people who make and verify news diversify away from a platform, it’s a canary in the credibility mine.
Where the conversations went: Bluesky’s expert lanes
Bluesky isn’t just the “next Twitter” — it’s becoming the hall where specialists compare notes.
A Nature news feature and companion coverage in the Guardian describe the first large-scale analyses of scholarly posts on Bluesky: research posts there earn more engagement and originality than equivalent content on X, despite Bluesky’s smaller user base.
Translation: scientists aren’t just lurking; they’re building threads, peer-reviewing in public, and signal-boosting credible sources.
Community-level studies back that up. Analyses of hundreds of thousands of academic accounts show measurable migration from X to Bluesky between 2023 and 2025, with scholars who rebuild more of their old networks on Bluesky becoming more active and engaged than they were on X.
In parallel, reporting from tech and trade outlets highlights higher original posting and stronger scholarly engagement on Bluesky, especially around new papers and fieldwork.
But isn’t X still the biggest room?
Absolutely—X remains the largest real-time megaphone for breaking news, and Pew’s 2024 snapshot still found heavy exposure to news there. But size isn’t the whole story.
In professional contexts, signal-to-noise, safety, and predictability drive where people do work.
When ad buyers pull budgets, newsrooms spread their bets, and scientists rebuild forums elsewhere, that’s a structural trust shift—even if people keep one eye on X for headlines.
Why experts say Bluesky “feels” better for work
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Moderation & tone: Smaller networks with clearer rules can make it easier to sustain constructive threads around papers, datasets, or field notes—exactly the content professionals need to circulate. (Think breakout rooms vs. a stadium.) Nature and Guardian both note higher quality interactions around research on Bluesky.
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Network reconstruction: New studies suggest that who moves first matters. When key information sources (editors, PIs, specialty reporters) migrate, their audiences follow—then engagement compounds. That pattern appears repeatedly in academic and journalism circles.
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Lower brand-risk surface area: For organizations, a platform with steadier moderation optics and fewer adjacency surprises is easier to brief to legal and brand-safety teams—hence the ad-spend trendlines.
What this means if you’re a specialist (or you work with them)
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Journalists & comms: Keep a monitor tab on X for breaking leads, but source-build on Bluesky where expert threads are denser and less performative. Many newsrooms are already doing both, with assignment editors watching Bluesky lists the way they once watched “Science Twitter.”
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Researchers & NGOs: Claim your handle, pin your ORCID/website, and mirror key threads. Early movers in subfields (climate, AI safety, public health) report better peer feedback loops on Bluesky. The first-mover advantage is real when conferences and journals start tagging there.
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Brands with experts (B2B, healthcare, climate): Treat Bluesky like an emerging professional channel, not a mass-reach play. Put SMEs up front, publish artifacts (figures, preprints, methods), and plan for fewer impressions but better contacts (bookings, citations, collabs). Meanwhile, if you maintain an X presence, lock your adjacency controls and uplevel manual monitoring to match risk tolerance.
The wider impact: trust migration reshapes the “public square”
Ecosystems don’t collapse — they re-route. Ad budgets exiting X pressure its roadmap and moderation capacity, which in turn pushes more professionals to parallel networks.
Bluesky, for its part, still faces the classic scaling test: can it preserve high-signal expert culture while adding millions more users? Early indicators suggest growth with some slowing, but expert engagement remains sticky, particularly in science and journalism.
If that holds, 2026 looks less like “one winner” and more like stacked arenas: X for mass breaking news, Bluesky for specialty discourse, with Threads and LinkedIn carving distinct lanes.
Bottom line
Trust is a professional currency, and in 2025 that currency is cheaper on X and pricier on Bluesky.
The ad market’s retreat (Kantar), safety optics (regulator data), and expert migration (Nature/Guardian analyses) all point the same direction: for specialists, Bluesky is where the work happens, even if they keep scanning X’s firehose.
If you trade in credible notes—policy, science, health, climate—plan accordingly.
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