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November 16, 2024 - 1:30pm
Millions of social media users have migrated from X to alternative platform Bluesky this year, resulting in an online subculture defined in opposition to Elon Musk’s platform.
Content moderation was significantly weakened after Musk took over X, formerly Twitter, and downsized the unit overseeing these efforts. Since then, content on the site has become considerably more profane, and the platform has seen a massive uptick in the use of slurs. One racist slur quickly saw its use on X triple. Meanwhile, online etiquette has become an obsession among Bluesky’s 16.7 million users.
Etiquette policing, according to some on Bluesky, has been an issue since the platform first launched. Users are also discouraged from reposting screenshots from X or even mentioning the site. However, “the other place” remains one of the most popular topics on Bluesky, with many posts complaining about hateful content on X and Musk’s potentially problematic relationship with Donald Trump. Former CNN anchor Don Lemon left X for Bluesky this week, and has since claimed he’s receiving more engagement on the new platform than “elsewhere, if you know what I mean”, despite having fewer followers.
Bluesky has official community guidelines against “promoting hate or extremist conduct that targets people or groups based on their race, gender, religion, ethnicity, nationality, disability, or sexual orientation”, and violating these can result in content being taken down. But the website’s etiquette code extends far beyond the official rules. Some users have created shareable mass block lists to automatically block, for instance, all users who so much as follow a certain account. The blocking function, which has been hampered on Musk’s X, is used liberally on Bluesky, with popular posts encouraging the blocking of specific accounts perceived as hateful.
In this environment, the type of Left-wing content that once flourished on pre-Musk Twitter, such as concerns that the New York Times has a pro-Trump bias, has found a home. Journalist Taylor Lorenz is on the app, encouraging her followers to wear Covid masks and contemplating whether the red heart emoji has become a MAGA symbol. The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin is on the site too, calling Tulsi Gabbard a “Putin stooge” and urging Democratic lawmakers to join the platform.
Bluesky gained one million new users in the week after Trump won the election, but some liberals who have remained on X warn that moving to the app will only exacerbate the perception of the Left as being alienated from working-class Americans. Past efforts to create Twitter and X alternatives have seen limited success. Mastodon, the app liberal Twitter users initially flocked to when Musk took over the platform, and Trump’s Truth Social both have small user bases compared to their main competitor. Since they’re respectively Left and Right-wing by design, they lack the engagement and conflict that made Twitter so successful. However, as content on X becomes increasingly Right-wing, and it becomes less popular, the once-dominant platform could face an identical problem.
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Ha ha ha very funny
The CCP couldn’t have come up with a better plan for ensuring conformity.
As the saying goes. Free speech is hate speech to those who hate free speech. The left, like their Islamist bedfellows, can’t cope with any criticism. It’s that beautiful alliance between the Marxist left and Islamofascist right. They are perfectly suited, as they both have the same goals, the total destruction of Western Civilisation. It worked so well for them during the Iranian revolution they can’t wait to apply it elsewhere.
BlueSky will remain a bit player in social media … anybody who truly believes in ‘free’ speech will remain with X
Noticeable, those moving to BlueSky are of the left and generally adopt a woke profile and deny people free speech.
X will continue to grow as it rolls out more benefits.
Has content on X really become ‘increasingly right wing’? Or is it just that the left wing censor types are leaving?
Well Musk did allow back several far right types previously banned, so in that sense yes, but as you seem to be indicating it’s actually very much in the eye of the beholder. If you stick to viewing only the accounts you follow, and if they’re not right wing, then you’ll barely notice right Twitter/X.
They are leaving because a) they like censorship and b) Trump won convincingly and they are embarrassed.
To be honest, when people complain about seeing too much stuff they don’t like on X, I can only assume they don’t block people. I block anybody I find even slightly annoying or idiotic, and the algorithm has been pretty much bashed into shape that I only get what I am looking for in my “for you” feed.
I suspect the complainers actually like to be offended and then perform outrage about it. Therefore, they cannot bring themselves to exercise the block button. The real issue is not seeing stuff they disapprove of, it’s that the thrill of assembling a righteous mob with online torches to burn the identified heretic is gone.
I wonder how long they’ll last on a platform where they never get a hit of “well I never! what a dreadful thing to say! this person must be removed” I suspect that they’ll either get bored and quietly crawl back to X, or they’ll start to engage in the usual purity spirals with a new set of speech standards to get that good-good fix of social shaming. They are welcome to their own little hellhole.
I don’t really understand what increasingly right wing means. More supportive of free markets, more about family values, putting on very smart uniforms and invading Poland or making nasty comments about different groups (mind the left can give the right a run for its money on hating particular groups)?
If people make nasty racial or homophobic comments, surely most of us would ignore or block them. I’d be surprised if gentle, well adjusted people who saw a tweet condemning, oh I don’t know, Japanese people, would suddenly decide they hated Japanese people and that they should be expelled from all God fearing nations.
Elon Musk bought Twitter just over 2 years ago and what he has done with it is just amazing. He bought the company at $44 billion and took it private so we no longer know how much it is worth. But Fidelity invested in the deal and now values the company at about $12.5 billion. Some other investors have written off their investments completely.
If you accept Fidelity’s valuation that’s a 72% drop. I can’t think of any other case where so much value was vaporized in so little time. Truly amazing.
UPDATE: Re-reading my post, it sounds snarkier than I intended. I don’t like Elon Musk, but I admire what he has done at Tesla and SpaceX. Even with Twitter I think he took a reasonable gamble and should be admired for that. But with gambles sometimes you lose. With Twitter I think he’s lost.
UPDATE: After looking a little deeper, I see that X CEO Linda Yaccarino has managed to entice some big advertisers back to X, buoyed perhaps by the election results on November 5. Elon Musk welcomed them back with the promise that their ads will only go with content they want it to. And even with the large brands gone for the past year smaller brands had stepped up their advertising.
There are several ways to read this development. Maybe the big brands want to mend fences with Elon Musk now that he has so much power in the government. Or maybe this is the result of Linda Yaccarino’s long-term efforts. (She’s a heavyweight in marketing.) Maybe both, and other factors.
I’m still not impressed with X’s prospects. But Elon Musk has surprised me before. Maybe he’ll surprise me again.
So free speech costs!
Yes, free speech costs, and people are not willing to pay the price. Elon Musk is selling something people are not buying.
Elon is the one who has paid the price. His critics at BlueSky have short arms, they have not shelled out one dime
Elon Musk is selling subscriptions to users and advertising to companies. He has cut costs drastically so he can get by on a lot less revenue, but even so he seems to be running at a loss.
X is a private company and it doesn’t make its financials public. But it does provide those figures to its private investors and lenders, and some of them have to publicly value their stake. Most of them value the company at a small fraction of what Elon Musk paid. Some value it at zero.
That’s not normal. In fact, I can’t think of another company so grossly mismanaged that it lost so much so quickly after being acquired. Usually companies that lose almost 3/4 of their value do it because of external factors, like a financial crisis or industry-wide weakness. This is all the fault of Elon Musk.
Elon Musk is a genius, but even geniuses make mistakes.
He’s not running it to make money. Otherwise he would bend the knee to the advertising cartels demanding more censorship. The price he paid to buy it was twice as much as its value. He knew that and bought it anyway. Assuming Musk bought Twitter to make money is incorrect.
It’s not a mistake if he was buying democracy a chance.
Okay, I’m back to wanting to hear more about Huma Abedin. Please, no show of genitalia.
Was Musk’s goal in this case to make money ?
No, Elon Musk’s goal in buying Twitter was not to make money off the deal. But his goal was to make Twitter a more vibrant, thriving company that people would flock to and advertisers would fund. Instead he’s destroyed the company, making it essentially worthless.
Elon Musk can afford the loss and continue to keep the company going indefinitely. Maybe he pulls off a miracle and finds some way to get things on a more positive track. But I doubt it. He seems determined to kill it off. And his fellow investors are not at all happy about that.
I wish I had a 12b dollar asset.
He bought it as a platform for free speech not to make money. He knew it was grossly over-valued. It was chump change for him.
That’s not what Elon Musk told the people who bought Twitter with him. Or the financial institutions who gave him loans. He told those people he was going to unlock the value in Twitter and expand what Twitter offered, so that it was an app that people used for all kinds of things, not just tweeting.
Jack Dorsey, one of the founders of Twitter, invested a billion dollars in the company. He believed Elon Musk’s pitch. And he is not happy at all. Not many are. Twitter is a corporate basket case, with a heavy debt load and an owner who is not making things better but worse.
https://x.com/stephenhilton23/status/1854320812272034154?
Well give Musk time. And might I add that I am NOT HAPPY with Jack Dorsey at all and nor are millions of others. Under his watch the FBI et al infiltrated Twitter and were censoring us all in line with what governments wanted said. Disgusting behaviour. f**k Jack Dorsey, we needs to write out the Twitter Files daily for 20 years. We all suffered because of these malevolent people.
My reply when I used the ef word disappeared. Under his watch Jeff Dorsey allowed hundreds of FBI et al people to infiltrate and proscribe to Twitter as to what should be censored, so I’m not happy with Jack Dorsey at all and frankly I am delighted that he is not happy. Remember the Twitter Files. Disgraceful.
All true.
But didn’t Musk try to back out of the deal to buy Twitter?
Either as a negotiation tactic to lower purchase price or he really wanted to pull out but was forced by court to complete the deal?
He probably paid twice what it was worth when he bought it. A lot of the devaluation was baked in – not all, but a lot.
He knew he overpaid. He took it it the trash not just to downsize, but because a lot of them were useless and a lot of them were actively malevolent.
I can’t see why this post has received so many downvotes. It seems rather thoughtful
Red is in.
Possibly because it focuses on the ( negative) economic side of the buyout, completely neglecting the very real possibility that Musk took it over to maintain or recover free speech.
That was Musk’s stated aim.
I think Twitter was a brilliant name for a platform dedicated to Bird Brains.
And twits too. Twitter for twits. A perfect name.
“Nah nah nah, I can’t hear you.”
Very adult.
Why does the author use the word ‘weakened’ when describing content moderation. It was deliberately ‘reduced’, not ‘weakened’. And thankfully so.
I would say fixed.
In the veterinary sense?
Non legacy media was the main influence on the election and X played the biggest role in the US election results. The amount of data, news and organisation was absolutely fascinating to watch. The pollsters were completely wrong but Musk himself with his America PAC consistently called it correctly.
The content is not more right wing, the content is more representative of what the majority of centrists really believe and are now allowed express.
IDK but how many sign up for the Blue Oyster Cult and keep their X as well? Obviously X failed to artificially amplify voices that Twitter favored and doesn’t defer to FBI, etc curating. That may have given some voices an exaggerated sense of importance and agreement. Maybe that will be recovered on BSky but at much lower volume.
Plus for many like Rubin or Lemon it is a handy alternative to physically leaving the country. They can just handle by announcing departure from racist, Nazi X & receive the stroking they crave on Blue Sky. Cheap easy gratification..
The whole world is becoming more right wing. Where ya been?
Is this true though? I would be considered far right today. I was considered a Democrat 10 years ago. My views haven’t changed.
You are not alone
Something has.
Yeah lots of White schizophrenia going around. You might be a Trotskyite next week. It’s called White Privileges run amok.
Trump lost a lot of money, Musk lost a lot of money, so what should we say? Should we say they’re idiots, or should we say thank you for what they did for us?
I disagree. I see more aggression in the comments in The Times than on X.
As a woman, I’ve see how gender critical people were systematically cancelled or reported on, especially in the UK where the police would get tipped off on any supposedly transphobic tweet.
Elon Musk bought Twitter when he found out they’d banned The Babylon Bee – a very funny site but, of course, they’re conservative so they had to go.
I’m conservative, and I don’t find the Bee that funny — but they gore the oxen I want gored, so I defend them.
There used to be a joke in Australia that Holden cars were built so that d*ckheads didn’t drive Fords.
It’s like going on a two year bender and then deciding to live in the bar is a healthy decision.
Another lefty loser playground that will implode soon.
Out of curiosity and as an independent observer, I visited bluesky’s site (specifically their ‘Discover’ posts) for about two minutes. Five user-posts down, I read the following:
I’m sure someone at bluesky will successfully explain why these type of high-volume liked posts aren’t really “promoting hate or extremist conduct that targets people or groups based on their race, gender, religion, ethnicity, nationality, disability, or sexual orientation.” Right?
Many posts proudly display the user’s self-vaunted hatred of hatred, that the other side says is a response to their hatred of hatred, that the other side says is a response to their hatred of hatred, etc.
These self-righteous posts remind me of a sibling who fights with their sister, after which they grumpily exclaim, “but she started it!” as they run to their room, slam the door, and sulk alone for hours while thinking that their sulking will somehow teach their parents a lesson or two (even as the parents actually forgot that the child is sulking):
[misspellings are common]
If these make you yawn, they also have an extremist corner where users preach about fighting back after this past “Dunkirk” of an election, how they’re part of the mobilization of the “Resistance,” how they’re discussing “plan[s] of attack” and so forth. It’s like planning an insurrection is suddenly all the rage for those who declared that insurrections are bad for democracy up until a few weeks ago.
I suspect that most centrists will be mentally fatigued after merely reading the posts on the ‘Discover’ page.
How long does it take to get blocked? Need to do some experimentation!
Never had a Twitter account, nor X or BlueSky. I guess it’s maybe my age but can’t understand the fascination. I did though read an Article somewhere that suggested overall this form of social media had a negative impact on emotions and on attention/concentration span. The latter tallied with stuff I’ve read about smart phone technology per se – see Johann Hari ‘Stolen Focus’. And besides I struggle to find time to read all Unherd articles and stimulated conversations, and Unherd not the only media I try to read. There must be a heck of alot of folks with little else to do who’ve crashed their attention span.
Howe many users does Twitter have compared to Bluesky?
Bluesky – 15 million
Twitter – 586 million.
I don’t think Musk is worried.
Why has Jennifer Rubin not been censored for calling Tulsi Gabbard a “Putin stooge”? Is this not hate speech?
Oh no. You see, Gabbard is a Putin stooge. Rubin said it, and I believe it. There’s always room for truth on Bluesky.
Wait — I have just been informed that “Bluesky” is actually pronounced “Blueski,” and was set up by a Russian troll farm. It’s Rubin that’s the stooge. That doesn’t acquit Gabbard, however.
The people who run Bluesky are stating that the number of reports they are getting for content moderation is now beyond their capacity to process – about 3000 reports an hour.
Is there too much hate speech on Bluesky?
“(C)ontent on the site has become considerably more profane, and the platform has seen a massive uptick in the use of slurs.”
This is according to AP (hardly a disinterested source) quoting a group calling itself The Center for Countering Digital Hate. Again, the opposite of an objective source.
Meanwhile, BlueSky is like Twitter’s stalker, unable to think about anything but what the object of its obsession is doing.
That Center exists to counter the need for its leadership to avoid an empty wallet
It will come down to whether influential and powerful people and organisations find X or Bluesky better at getting their message across, i.e., which delivers a better return, financial and/or political. Let’s see if the Guardian comes back to X.
The change to TwitterX moderation was nicely illustrated by the photo of the previous moderators leaving in a sorry lineup with their boxes of possessions. A bunch of blokes in frocks. Have they all gone to bluesky?
Anyway now I can post things that are critical, or sometimes mocking, of the transactivist agenda without getting banned. Women will stay.
Meanwhile I’ve opened a bluesky account in my X username as trolls are making accounts in the names of high-profile critics of that TRA agenda, to be able to mess with bluesky algorhythms. Not planning to use it, just insurance. Musk has a daughter who is very publicly transitioning, which could be informing some of his choices, so I expect him to keep X going.