Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Bluesky?

All social media platforms are ideologically biased. It's counterproductive for liberals to attack the only left-leaning one.

When Twitter was hijacked by a wealthy ideologue back in 2022 to amplify far-right voices and serve as a recruitment tool for the MAGA movement, the market did what the market tends to do and spat out a dozen alternatives for those who weren’t happy with the situation to migrate to. Many of them were sort of just clones of Twitter. Only one of them is routinely pilloried by the mainstream media as a dangerous and even socially harmful den of toxicity.

But it’s not the one that the billionaire owns and pays alt-right influencers to fill up with white nationalist slop. It’s not even the one owned and controlled by the United States’ fashy president. The one platform that faces the bulk of the media’s ire is Bluesky. The lefty one.

I’m not going to lie and tell you that much of Bluesky isn’t a big old lefty circlejerk and I’m not even going to tell you that it isn’t obnoxious. Here’s a hard to swallow pill for you: Every social media platform is obnoxious. I personally find Bluesky less obnoxious than most of the other options because I, like you, tend to find things less obnoxious when they broadly approach my own position on things. In short, “wokescolds” can be annoying, but I’ll take them any day of the week over a Roman statue/Pepe the Frog avatar dogpile.

Or the worst combination of the two

Nevertheless, there’s just something about this one platform that drives some columnists apoplectic. The recent volley of attacks started with WaPo columnist Megan McArdle whose piece reflects this common but unsubstantiated idea that Twitter is and will forever be the only platform on the internet where political influence can be developed and brokered, so leftists abandoning it to go hang out on some other site that might as well be the Siberia of cyberspace merely forfeits the only platform that will ever matter and leaves it the sole property of the far right.

Don’t misinterpret this warning as McArdle being sympathetic to the left’s mission for political influence. McArdle is one of many columnists in her political bracket who believes the Democratic party needs to move to the right to win elections. Or, to put it another way, they need to become Republican Lite (which is terrible advice for the same reason that the diet version of a product rarely outsells the regular one.) She buys into the Taibbi/Shellenberger narrative of a vast conspiracy on pre-Musk Twitter to censor conservatives, and claims this narrative manipulation led the Democratic party to falsely believe that left-wing views are popular.

So now that Elon has thrown up an UNO Reverse card, literally prioritizing right-wing views and suppressing left-wing ones, we should be square, right? Why write a whole op-ed complaining about Bluesky?

A Very American Fascism

The (conservative? liberal? center-right-middle-independent? nobody knows, he’s “heterodox”) writer Josh Barro builds upon this but argues further that it’s a damn good thing all the leftists who stubbornly refuse to move to the right and abandon the “wacky” stuff Real America hates, like racial diversity, quarantined themselves on another website far away. The whole thing reads like sour grapes, as much as Barro would deny wanting anything to do with it.

Again, neither of these authors are exactly X-dot-com superfans; they’re not stanning Elon’s renovations and unequivocally saying “love what you’ve done with the place.” Neither of them are throwing up suspicious salutes or praising MAGA. They’re not Breitbart writers—their stomping ground is Washington Post and New York Times respectively. Center-right Democrats. In so far as it’s a two-party system, they’re closer to the same “team” as the average Bluesky user than the average X user, but even as Musk’s X is frequently cited as a financial disaster propped up by one man’s disposable wealth, they would much sooner see Bluesky fail than X.

Or, for that matter, Truth Social, or even fucking Gab.

That Bluesky is a threat to anything is never the point. Its haters would ridicule the idea that it ever could be. They don’t fear it, many don’t even use it, but its existence offends people nonetheless. The real complaint boils down to the perception that it’s impenetrable.

This is an old complaint in internet communities and it’s the same boiling rage that fuels the animosity toward “safe spaces,” a term that was big among reactionaries back in the days when “woke” was called “SJW.” Again, nobody ever claimed to feel threatened by safe spaces but they needed to be obliterated all the same.

Just as an aside, nobody has any problem with a "safe space" when it's called a "man cave."

Not to get all Bluesky on you and start throwing around terms like “privilege,” but it’s nothing more than a straightforward observation that most of these people are fairly well-off white guys and girls who can’t conceive of ever wanting a safe space of their own, especially for how much they live for internet arguments. What absolutely cannot be tolerated is the thought that some group of people, somewhere, are having pleasant interactions and potentially being wrong about stuff, and you can’t get into the room to correct them.

While it’s perfectly possible and reasonable to just stay on Xwitter and argue with people, it just seems to sap the thrill out of it knowing that Bluesky is out there. So you get mean-spirited and bonkers plots like Jesse Singal’s months-long scheme to “colonize” Bluesky for no reason but to make its users angry, because he doesn’t like them.

Again, Singal doesn’t actually have to use that website, but its existence is like a splinter in his brain. He simply cannot rest.

For people who find themselves addicted to online argument the mere presence of people who don’t like to spend their every waking minute embroiled in pointless unwinnable flame wars is seen as not only alien but a downright moral failing. I feel people have a similar attitude toward online harassment—even people who do not actively engage in harassment often feel little sympathy for its victims and no patience for the subject.

It's a troubling philosophy of the internet era, and I fear it’s one that is ratcheting the whole Overton window in a dangerous direction: Constant immersion within a sea of reactionary abuse is necessary for one’s adult development. It’s not just the reactionaries themselves who believe this, but also non-progressive liberals and centrists who otherwise reject the reactionaries. Even as they would likely deny it, they accept the framing of far-right figures like Elon Musk that left-wing and progressive ideas are a mind virus, something that must be, if not eradicated, then strongly diluted by constant bombardment by right-wing talking points, a process that’s often given softer descriptions like “exposure to alternative ideas.”

If you’re in any way social on the internet then you’re not even allowed to suffer this misery as a part time job. There can be no retreat or reprieve. To leave a platform exhausted from abuse is an intolerable weakness. The bile and harassment and argument and anger are your medicine and you must take your medicine.

Importantly, to understand how this commonly accepted frame is set up to massively benefit reactionaries: This attitude only ever applies to left-wing echo chambers and not to the right.

Here’s another recent article for the pile. I can’t read beyond Slate’s paywall but in the opening paragraphs staff writer Luke Winkie describes Bluesky as worse than Xwitter, and does so while acknowledging that Musk’s platform is practically a neo-Nazi monoculture.

Anti-woke liberals after being reprimanded for not using ALT-text

Right-wing ideologies on the internet have benefited from very successful marketing from which even liberals have come to see them as the default background radiation of cyberspace. Left-wing ideologies, on the other hand, have mass. They must be handled safely and never be permitted to accumulate too densely lest the dreaded radicalization process will begin.

I’m not even denying the negative psychological effects of echo chambers, but this framing frequently ignores or dismisses the negative effects of right-wing echo chambers. After all, that’s just the normal internet. To view poisonous garbage even as extreme as Nazism as a necessary force to counter or dampen the dangerous ideologies of the left is to frame it as benign or even positive.

But we have seen the negative effects of right-wing radicalization in people who are bathed in that toxicity for an extended amount of time. It has happened repeatedly within the internet generation in communities like 4Chan. It’s happening right now in the white supremacy furnace that is Elon Musk’s Xwitter, and it’s happening at his direction because it happened to Elon Musk.

Rehabilitating the radical right as some sort of positive counterbalance to milquetoast scolding over ableist language, ALT text, misgendering, and even my own bugbear of platform shaming is exactly what the radical right wants and plays directly into their project of luring people back into that furnace. Weakening the left as kindling to strengthen the right.

If your opinion about a social media platform is that it’s obnoxious or annoying or offensive or full of stupid people or it’s an echo chamber of views you disagree with, then the easiest way to deal with this problem is to leave it alone and don’t use it. This is a technique I’ve used with Gab and Truth Social every day of their existence and increasingly now with Elon Musk’s white supremacist dumpster fire.

There will always be safe spaces on all sides of politics. If you object to the far right’s ideological internet project, then for the love of god stop doing their work for them.

I'm writing a book about how internet social media pushed western culture toward the far right and how we went from hippies to DOGE within a single generation. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here: