Bluesky, an alternative to Elon Musk’s X, saw downloads rise by 430% during election week, Axios reports.

Follow Political Wire on Bluesky at @politicalwire.com.

“The Justice Department and a group of states asked a federal court late Wednesday to force Google to sell Chrome, its popular web browser, a move that could fundamentally alter the $2 trillion company’s business and reshape competition on the internet,” the New York Times reports.

“Beyond the sale of Chrome, the government asked Judge Mehta to give Google a choice: either sell Android, its smartphone operating system, or bar Google from making its services mandatory on phones that use Android to operate.”

“SpaceX’s latest test flight of its Starship vehicle on Tuesday got off to a sobering start, as the company was unable to recover the enormous booster stage of the rocket, the most powerful ever built. But about an hour later, the vehicle’s upper stage was more successful with the completion of a daring maneuver to splash down in the Indian Ocean,” the New York Times reports.

“The late-afternoon launch brought President-elect Donald Trump to the company’s South Texas launch site along the Gulf of Mexico for a show of solidarity with Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and the world’s richest man, who helped catapult the former president back to the White House.”

Financial Times: SpaceX abandons attempt to catch Starship booster as Donald Trump watches on.

“Top Justice Department antitrust officials have decided to ask a judge to force Alphabet Inc.’s Google to sell off its Chrome browser in what would be a historic crackdown on one of the world’s biggest tech companies,” Bloomberg reports.

“President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday chose Brendan Carr to be chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, naming a veteran Republican regulator who has publicly agreed with the incoming administration’s promises to slash regulation, go after Big Tech and punish TV networks for political bias,” the New York Times reports.

Washington Post: “Carr, the senior Republican commissioner on the FCC, has laid out an aggressive agenda in Project 2025, a conservative proposal for Trump’s second term developed by the Heritage Foundation, and has vowed in recent days to take on what he called a ‘censorship cartel’ including Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft.”

New York Times: “If the election underscored anything about the internet, it was how far social media platforms had moved to the right. While Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and other sites continue to be popular gathering places for entertainment and meme-making, political discourse online has increasingly shifted to an array of mostly right-wing sites that have built up their audiences and stoked largely partisan conversations.”

“The change was an unintended consequence of a series of decisions made by some of the biggest social platforms nearly four years ago.”

“President-elect Donald Trump is expected to try to halt a potential U.S. ban of TikTok next year, after he promised on the campaign trail to save the popular social media app if he won,” the Washington Post reports.

“The video-sharing app faces a January deadline to find a new owner not based in China or lose access to U.S. users, under a law passed in April with bipartisan support.”

“More than a year before Donald Trump’s landslide victory in last week’s presidential election, TikTok’s top leaders insisted on a major shift in the app’s content moderation principles to make the platform more appealing for Trump and his supporters,” The Information reports.

New York Times: “Believing that his political positions are fluid and his actions are often transactional, they are forging direct relationships they hope will benefit their businesses.”

NBC News: “In the two years since then, Musk has transformed the platform, once regarded as the global town square, into an echo chamber amplifying right-leaning causes and in particular former President Donald Trump’s electoral campaign, according to academic research, public opinion surveys, data on X’s most influential users, engagement metrics and reports about X’s working directly with the Trump campaign.”

“And in recent months, Musk has become one of Trump’s biggest donors and most energetic supporters, turning X into an unofficial house organ for his campaign.”

“As the election approaches, X’s AI-powered trending section has promoted voter-fraud conspiracy theories and smears against Vice President Kamala Harris.”

“New X users with interests in topics such as crafts, sports and cooking are being blanketed with political content and fed a steady diet of posts that lean toward Donald Trump and that sow doubt about the integrity of the Nov. 5 election,” a Wall Street Journal analysis found.