#aauth # Is Bluesky a Leftist Echochamber or an Exciting Innovation in Social Media and Sanity Safehaven? (DRAFT v1) ### From: [Things at Bluesky Going as Well as Could Be Expected (Hotair)](https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2024/11/20/things-at-bluesky-going-as-well-as-could-be-expected-n3797190) (**Published**: *November 20, 2024*) **HotAir** points out that, as of the time of publishing, the popularity of **BlueSky** has *skyrocketed*, going from 6 million users in late August to 15 million halfway through November. **Bluesky** gained around 4 million users from late October to mid November alone, and has sat comfortably atop the most-downloaded apps lists on both **Apple's App Store** and the **Google Play Store**. This is about where the "*facts and reality*" components of the **Hotair** article _skkkrt_ right out of the room. **Buckle up, team.** The author, John Sexton, after this introductory bit of top-notch journalism, makes the claim that **Bluesky**--_just as he predicted, guys(!!!)_--has become "*a home for the kind of progressive intolerance that would turn any platform into a hellscape.*" Rather than do something amateurish such as linking some quantitative data on user activity or signups to bolster his claims, he instead links to . . . (checks notes) _two Tweets_. (*Also, I'm not fucking calling it "X."*) [The first of which was posted by **Megan McArdle**](https://x.com/asymmetricinfo/status/1856388352381010222), a (presumably) Republican columnist for the Washington Post, and consists of 4 points that service as her professional, in-depth analysis on the rise and current state of Bluesky. **It reads:** > First impression: > > 1) I am possibly the most conservative person on the site, and I voted for Harris. > > 2) Group dynamics make it hard to voice dissent. (I got blocked by someone for noting that in 2019, just under 3,000 females were victims of homicide, which means the overwhelming majority of women are, thankfully, at low risk of being killed by a man in their life.) > > 3) Founder effects mean this dynamic will be hard to change. The libertarians I see there mostly seem to be posting on issues where they agree with progressives, not ones where they disagree. Progressives who point out that, say, it's actually really hard to denaturalize a citizen and this is probably not a big risk, even under Trump, are getting dragged. > > 4) I'm not sure there's Twitter-level demand for a conversation that is restricted to agreeing with the leftmost 7% of the electorate. I must admit to you, my younger brother was the first person to bring this article and its "tweet-evidence" to me. I assured him I would be able to refute, or otherwise dismantle, the claims in her Tweet without looking up any data, academic papers, or even leaving the page that the Tweet was on. I bring to you, my attempt to do so now: what I write here will be whatever I came up with first upon reading this Tweet masterpiece ("_Tweeterpiece?"_), unaltered, aside from edits of the language for improved readability. **Let's break it down, one point at a time:** > 1) I am possibly the most conservative person on the site, and I voted for Harris. I'm going to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that she didn't mean this literally. I'm also going to assume she's telling the truth about who she voted for, despite the fact that the rest of the Tweet makes me think otherwise for a whole host of reasons. As someone that's spent at least a half hour on Bluesky, I can assure you that this is not the case. The site has become a new home for huge swathes of people from a variety of backgrounds that are tired of the excessive toxicity, crypto scams, [sketchy bot behavior](https://youtu.be/GZ5XN_mJE8Y?si=MC0ofbE32gnNmrCQ), and otherwise dumpster-tier posts that Twitter not only floods your feed with, but _actively promotes to you_ because of Elon's new verified user system. This system prioritizes users that pay a monthly fee for the blue check mark, regardless of qualification or identity. This new wave--or caravan--of Twitter refugees join a large number of folks seeking respite from the upcoming Trump Administration and its supporters online behavior. Also important to note is the fact that Twitter recently _broke_ third party add-ons that de-prioritize verified users right before the election--the existence of which alone hilariously verify that quality of material being churned out by "verified users." Conversely, if you wanted to quantify user movements and sentiment on Bluesky--and had some programming ability--the platform offers full transparency of literally _everything_ posted on the website ([along with its source code](https://github.com/bluesky-social)), whereas Twitter has recently entirely shut off any such access from **everyone**. This _also_ happened right before the election (a move I found both shocking and completely unsurprising). Does this mean the site has become an ideologically-captured echo chamber for extreme Leftists? Again, if we assume that Megan actually voted for Harris, her mere existence and initial experience on the site stands as firm evidence of its strengths over the current Twitter environment. If she had gotten harassed and DM'd death-threats--common Twitter behaviors--_we would know because she would've told us at least four times already_ in the Tweet to sharpen her points about "Bluesky bad." Rather than force certain posts upon you from accounts you probably wish to never interact with, ever, Bluesky gives you control of your feed by allowing you to filter it through a variety of controls. Additionally, you have the ability to create "lists" of people, topics, and more that are then injected into your feed, as well as the ability to join "Starter Kits" with a singular click. Starter kits are basically communities around any topic of interest that you wish to interact with. For instance, I have an unhealthy emotional investment in LSU's college football team, and it's been a _rough_ year for us. To commiserate with fellow Tiger fans, I could join an LSU fan starter kit, which might include the coaching staff, players, high profile commentators, and a number of other crazed fans like myself. Much like a number of other Bluesky features, what you experience on the site is left entirely up to you and your willingness to tweak that experience to your liking. If you really wanted to spend time each day battling it out with fringe, Leftist crazies that have over 300 hours of consecutive engagement on the site because they simply refuse to log off and go touch grass, you can certainly have that delivered to you. You have no such option, or anything resembling it, on Twitter. > 2) Group dynamics make it hard to voice dissent. (I got blocked by someone for noting that in 2019, just under 3,000 females were victims of homicide, which means the overwhelming majority of women are, thankfully, at low risk of being killed by a man in their life.) **Oh man, this one's a doozy.** I'm pretty certain this point is entirely worthless, despite struggling to inject it with any real meaning in a good-faith attempt to steel-man her claim here. Dissent is hard to voice _where_? _What???_ You're free to disagree publicly--anywhere on the site you want--without risk of it being buried by the site's owner or policies of escalating certain users and opinions (unlike Twitter). And others are free to engage with it anyway they choose, whether it be argument or _full-fledged support_. Yes, the site has a majority of left-leaning and Trump-opposing users because they're all currently leaving Twitter. It's number one on the app stores, remember? It's the reason that all the right-leaning media are suddenly attempting to discredit and make fun of it, and why I'm writing this article to begin with. Why is some random user blocking you anything to note? Does that not happen on Twitter? Oh, wait, [Twitter recently made the block feature functionally worthless.](https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/18/why-changes-to-the-block-on-elon-musks-x-are-driving-users-away/) So the problem is that majority sentiment is . . . The majority sentiment? How is this any different from the content that gets upvoted to the front page of Reddit? Or the opinions that are the most popular on any other platform? I'm sorry, I have to stop thinking about the first sentence of point 2 before all my neurons suddenly experience mass [apoptosis](https://www.google.com/search?q=apoptosis). Has she considered that perhaps she got blocked because of her borderline offensively stupid statistical claim regarding women being murdered by men? Perhaps I'm understanding this incorrectly, but it seems as if she read the number 3,000 when reading about how many women are murdered each year, and thought to herself, "_huh, that's a small number compared to the total number of women in the US. Therefor, women being murdered by men must not be an issue here._" That **can't** be the extent of her analysis, yet seems to be exactly the implicit message here. If you have more than 4 operational brain cells, you would know that to gain any semblance of insight from this statistic regarding the number of women murdered by men compared to women, you need to investigate how many of the around 3,000 women are killed by either gender. The number in isolation is almost entirely useless - in science, we would say it has little **external validity** on its own. (I paid for this science degree so, dammit, we're gonna learn _something_ here guys.) A single search revealed to me (thanks Perplexity.ai) that, in 2022, 2,410 women were murdered by men. 87.5% of these victims knew their killer, with over half of them--a whopping 58%--being killed by either their husbands or boyfriends ([source](https://vpc.org/press/nearly-nine-out-of-10-women-murdered-by-men-are-killed-by-someone-they-know-and-two-thirds-die-by-gunfire-new-violence-policy-center-study-finds/)). Yes, it's a positive thing that the number of women murdered each year isn't higher. However, to even lightly suggest that the fact that the vast majority of them were murdered by a man they knew and, in over half of the murders, by their partner, _isn't a problem_ is, frankly, disgusting. And definitely worthy of a block. Next. > 3) Founder effects mean this dynamic will be hard to change. The libertarians I see there mostly seem to be posting on issues where they agree with progressives, not ones where they disagree. Progressives who point out that, say, it's actually really hard to denaturalize a citizen and this is probably not a big risk, even under Trump, are getting dragged. Speaking of using my science degree: for those unaware, the "**founder effect**" originally refers to a genetic phenomenon in which a new population experiences a loss of genetic variation after being established by a group that is much smaller than the population of origin. Obviously, she's not referring to a literal loss of genetic variation in the growing Bluesky userbase (there's a joke in there somewhere), though. The term _does_ have implications in psychology too, where its been observed that, in a new space, the founding group's beliefs can have a sticky or persistent impact on the beliefs that emerge later once the group has grown significantly in size. I was unable to find any published research on this psychological phenomenon's occurrence on social media platforms or online groups, so I'm unable to say for sure whether or not this is _really_ a thing. At first, it seemed somewhat reasonable to just assume that this is a very real occurrence. It's no secret that online echo-chambers, for the left and right, can be cannibalistic with purity testing. And its a very human thing when in new groups for people to say things they already know will get approval from the larger group to avoid being made pariahs in a new space. Before I do another potentially needlessly deep dissection of this claim, I want to instead just ask the questions I'm trying to raise: - If this _is_ real - is it a problem? - Does this problem _not_ already exist on Twitter? - Has a singular ideology ever permanently dominated a large social media platform indefinitely and remained popular? - Is there any indication or inherent issue with the way Bluesky works that would make it impossible to sway the majority opinion? Or permanently entrench it, snuffing out all opposition? **Here are my answers for each:** * I cannot think of an appropriately powerful reason that the current majority-left sentiment of the site is inherently bad or something incapable of shifting (especially with the wake-up call that was Trump's victory and Democrats now questioning the place of radical Left-leaning rhetoric in the party messaging) * This problem definitely exists on Twitter, and the mechanisms that would prevent an entrenching of a singular ideology have been stripped away and disabled by Musk since he acquired Twitter. Musk, the owner and functional dictator of the site, has spent millions supporting Trump and regularly broadcasts pure misinformation without correction to millions upon millions of users. If this problem exists on Bluesky, it is infinitely worse in magnitude on Twitter, and to pretend otherwise is pure insanity * I cannot think of one. Twitter did a great job for years broadcasting and platforming the absolute worst of opinions from all sides of the political spectrum * No and no. Bluesky's open-source nature and total transparency with its data essentially prevents total ideological capture, and allows citizens of the internet across the globe to police the mechanisms of its codebase **OKAY. LAST POINT. FINALLY.** > 4) I'm not sure there's Twitter-level demand for a conversation that is restricted to agreeing with the leftmost 7% of the electorate. Okay, I'm not gonna waste too much time on this. Google a graph--or something--of the userbase stats of Bluesky for this year. Look at the userbase for Twitter for comparison (and its stock-price . . . and [evaluation of the loans Musk used by its creditors while you're at it)](https://www.wsj.com/tech/elon-musks-twitter-takeover-is-now-the-worst-buyout-for-banks-since-the-financial-crisis-3f4272cb.) There's clearly an undeniable demand. The fact that the entire media arm of the Trump-party is currently lock-step in bad-mouthing Bluesky as its userbase explodes from the mass Twitter-exodus is telling enough that the Trump-party thinks of the website as a threat of significant capacity. Though I was unable to quickly locate where the 7% number she references comes from ([I'm currently convinced this is her source](https://youtu.be/r7l0Rq9E8MY?si=cuGl6zpo2D6dR0Gv)), she is likely referencing actual, existing research done in the last few years that showed that the [vast majority of Twitter activity from the left side of the political spectrum was posted by only a small portion of the actual Democratic party](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/08/upshot/democratic-electorate-twitter-real-life.html)--meaning the majority of Tweets weren't representative of the party in the real world. Her implication here is that the political dialogue on Bluesky is, or will become, restricted via social-policing by people whose beliefs represent only a small group of the most extreme left-leaning people. I have a fun exercise for this final point. Rather than me telling you what I think about this, how about you go check out https://bsky.app/ for a few minutes, come back, and tell me if you think her assessment is correct. In fact, why don't you address your thoughts to me directly on the platform. You can find me at [@justcallmesparks.bsky.social](https://bsky.app/profile/justcallmesparks.bsky.social) :) Thanks for reading, everyone, and have a wonderful week. ## -Sparks # Other Thoughts - We should start calling the Republican Party the Trump Party until they regain even the slightest semblance of a moral and political framework # Images and Links https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2024/11/13/some-on-the-left-leaving-x-to-find-their-safe-bubble-n3796954 https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2024/11/20/things-at-bluesky-going-as-well-as-could-be-expected-n3797190 https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2024/11/18/leftists-fleeing-x-for-bluesky-flood-platform-with-complaints-censorship-requests-and-child-pornography/ https://bsky.app/profile/safety.bsky.app/post/3layun7re5s2x https://www.business-standard.com/technology/apps/so-you-are-thinking-of-leaving-x-for-bluesky-how-does-it-work-124112400715_1.html https://github.com/bluesky-social https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/18/why-changes-to-the-block-on-elon-musks-x-are-driving-users-away/ - interesting tidbit: NPR receives less than 1% of its $300 million annual budget from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is federally funded https://bjs.ojp.gov/female-murder-victims-and-victim-offender-relationship-2021 https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-many-women-are-murdered-in-WX7Nt8XTRK6yRGsRWcymDw https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-many-women-are-murdered-in-WX7Nt8XTRK6yRGsRWcymDw https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-twitter-users/ https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/08/upshot/democratic-electorate-twitter-real-life.html https://www.wsj.com/tech/elon-musks-twitter-takeover-is-now-the-worst-buyout-for-banks-since-the-financial-crisis-3f4272cb