Do you Bluesky? If you are a COMMENTARY reader, the odds that you’re also a user of the alternative social-media site are slim. Bluesky began as an experimental side project at Twitter and was then spun off when Elon Musk bought the larger company in 2022. Operating on an invitation-only basis, Bluesky attracted artists, minorities, and (in Wikipedia’s summary) “left-wing, transgender, sex worker, and furry communities.” When Bluesky opened to the wider public in 2023, more left-leaning users flooded in, many of them hoping to escape the increased visibility of conservative views on Musk’s now laissez-faire platform redubbed “X.” Donald Trump’s election in November 2024 sparked another surge in migration as prominent liberals abandoned the site that omnicause activist George Monbiot calls “an incubator for fascism.”
It might seem crazy that so many left-wing thought leaders—and even entire media brands, such as the Guardian—would walk away from huge followings on X in exchange for a relatively tiny audience of like-minded souls on Bluesky. (The site’s total user base is well under a tenth of X’s global following.) But the move made sense as an expression of the left’s growing hypersensitivity to ideas leftists find offensive. Having emerged from the intersectional hothouses of academia, many progressives today view policy disputes through a therapeutic lens: They see themselves—and the marginalized groups they claim to speak for—as victims of trauma. The solution to that trauma is not rigorous debate. Quite the opposite; they need protection. Exposure to dangerous speech could threaten their mental stability. So progressives now treat opposing ideas not as errors that need to be rebutted with facts, but as dangerous contagions that must be quarantined.
Over the past two decades, intersectional activists used this logic to erect cordons sanitaires around college campuses and other institutions they dominate. Certain words were deemed off-limits; dangerous speakers had to be “deplatformed.” Twitter and other social-media channels played their part in this process. Usually, they did this voluntarily. (Remember when Twitter banned the president of the United States?) When the tech platforms hesitated, federal agencies and the White House leaned on them to squelch whatever the officials deemed wrongthink that particular week. (Covid came from a lab? Only a racist would think that!)
But then along came Musk with his promise to liberate Twitter from internal and external busybodies. At the same time, the people were starting to wake up to how woke culture—with all its edicts and taboos—was infiltrating schools, corporate culture, even Super Bowl ads. And they were beginning to push back. This was all too much for the sensitive progressives on X. When Bluesky gave them an escape hatch from the increasingly freewheeling—and sometimes raucous—debates on X, many jumped through it without looking back.
How’s that working out for them? Let’s look at the evidence.
The liberal exodus from X to Bluesky created a kind of real-world social-science experiment. It was as if progressives on one side and conservatives and centrists on the other sorted themselves into two separate laboratory dishes. (I don’t want to make too much of this; there are still plenty of liberals on X, and both platforms have lots of people mostly interested in nonpolitical topics. But stay with me.) With the most passionate progressives in one petri dish, and with conservatives and MAGA types now unleashed in the other, scientists could get out their notebooks and watch what kind of cultures emerged.
I’ve been on Twitter/X since its earliest days, and I still find it a useful way to keep tabs on the many topics I follow. In the Musk era, my feed on X has become noticeably more chaotic, with a higher proportion of random accounts shouting angrily into the void. Sometimes those voices come from the MAGA right (usually saying something about “treason” or “RINOS”). But there is plenty of anger from the left as well. For example, any post supportive of Israel is immediately attacked by nasty pro-Hamas accounts. I don’t love X’s somewhat uglier vibe, but I accept the trade-off. I’m willing to tolerate a few angry or idiotic posts in exchange for knowing that right-wing views aren’t being deliberately buried.
Despite the controversy, X has hardly become a conservative echo chamber. A late 2024 Pew Research Center poll found that news consumers on X are almost precisely balanced between Democrats and Republicans; two years earlier, Democrats outnumbered Republicans on the site more than two to one. I suspect that the progressives who feel threatened by right-wing “hate” have simply never experienced a cultural environment where conservatives speak as loudly as liberals. And, against all odds, Musk’s business strategy seems to be working. Though X’s total number of users has dropped, the site’s financial health is improving. Analysts estimate that the company’s total value is approaching the $44 billion Musk paid for it in 2022, a valuation most experts (including Musk himself) considered wildly inflated at the time.
When I recently signed up for a Bluesky account, the difference was striking. The site’s leftward tilt is vertiginous; where the most popular accounts on X feature a mix of entertainment, sports, and political figures, Bluesky is drenched in politics. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez leads the follower count, and the popular entertainers on the site—such as Mark Hamill and Barbra Streisand—are only there to talk about issues. If Bluesky users prefer a social-media site with the ambience of an MSNBC green room, I have no problem with it. Free country and all that. But Bluesky gets creepy fast. A shocking number of posts celebrate violence. For example, alleged assassin Luigi Mangione is the subject of breathless, teen-idol-level fan worship, including from one account simply called “@weloveluigi.”
The very first post the Bluesky algorithm fed me was a joke meme. “Scientists finally found a cure for fascism,” it read above a picture of people in white lab coats wielding huge baseball bats. That turned out to be a pretty good metaphor for Bluesky as a whole: gangs of people who consider themselves intellectually superior roaming around looking for skulls to crack. (Not to be outdone, the next post in the thread showed a picture of a guillotine, promoting this as a more effective way to silence one’s enemies.)
I quickly learned that the site’s core innovation is not finding ways to facilitate thoughtful conversations. Instead, Bluesky’s secret sauce is the powerful tools it gives users to shut down voices they disagree with. Block lists—featuring the names of people you will not permit to see your posts—are public and widely shared and discussed. “People make nasty lists and lists and lists there,” a Bluesky user in Germany explained to me. Many Bluesky regulars import other users’ lists wholesale, allowing them to block hundreds of people they’ve never even heard of. One frustrated user complained, “I barely have 1,000 followers here on Bluesky and I’ve already been blocked by 300+ people!”
Perhaps it’s no surprise that a platform built on the notion that users need sanctuary from dangerous ideas would encourage hypervigilance against intruders. Some Bluesky users roam the site like white blood cells in the human bloodstream, always searching for invading pathogens. Any time a new user arrives who shows signs of heterodox thinking, they raise the alarm. “Drive this piece of human garbage off our website,” wrote one when the ideologically unclassifiable Sohrab Ahmari (a former Commentary staffer) dared to join the Bluesky conversation.
The scientists studying the Bluesky petri dish could write an entire report on the case of the freelance journalist Jesse Singal’s chilling experience on the site. Singal covers social science and medicine with an eye toward the biases that undermine scientific integrity. In 2018, Singal wrote a groundbreaking Atlantic cover story about the weak science used to justify youth transgender medicine. The piece made him the target of enduring rage among transgender advocates and their allies on the left. When Singal joined Bluesky last year, users quickly circulated a petition to have him banned from the site. “Signed,” responded the singer Lizzo. “Now What’s his @ so I can block & report him?” The anti-Singal campaign grew into an orgy of unprintable smears, death threats, and the ugliest sorts of unfounded accusations about the writer. Simply banishing Singal wasn’t enough; one suggested, “I think if we all tried hard enough we could get Jesse Singal to kill himself.” People who suggested that perhaps the anti-Singal crowd might dial back the rhetoric got dog-piled themselves: “if you think jesse singal shouldnt be shot ur in need of getting shot urself,” another poster wrote.
How did a site supposedly designed for respectful conversation become so toxic? A sociologist would point to the strong incentives that drive people to identify with their in-group—such as a sports team or a political party—and to denigrate the out-group. In a diverse social environment, people usually keep these expressions within acceptable bounds. A Yankees fan might display a bumper sticker reading, say, “Beat the Red Sox” but stop short of “And Drag Their Entrails Through the Streets.” But when a social-media commu-nity defines itself as a refuge for the virtuous—one that is surrounded by enemies—that social restraint disappears. If you believe that the only people reading your post will be those on your own team, you are more likely to let loose. In fact, you will be rewarded for it as other users like and respond to the most performative expressions of outrage.
In real-world social circles, being a total flaming, um, jerk brings social costs. But in a hermetically sealed social-media bubble, it’s a way to build your status. Bluesky adds another perverse incentive: Anyone adding nuance or pushing back against violent statements risks being ridiculed and even mass-blocked by the online community. This combination of positive and negative rewards creates a one-way ratchet, always pushing users toward extremism.
Yes, a similar dynamic exists among some conservative X users, and you can find plenty of ugliness on the far right. But on X, in my experience at least, the nasty stuff doesn’t crowd out more balanced conversations. Thomas Chatterton Williams, another heterodox thinker, recently conducted his own inadvertent experiment testing this thesis. An Atlantic article he wrote about the so-called woke right was criticized both by the New York Times’ lefty columnist Jamelle Bouie on Bluesky and by conservative activist Chris Rufo on X. Being attacked from both sides comes with the territory for a centrist like Williams. “But the two experiences were not equivalent,” he noted (on X, naturally). “If I’m honest, it wasn’t even close to the same thing.” Williams says he found “far more good faith, graciousness, nuance, sense of fair play and diversity of thought” from Rufo’s followers on X than in the Bluesky comments inspired by Bouie.
On Bluesky, Williams found that “a total uniformity of opinion and malice defines the site.” He notes that other centrists, including contrarian liberal Matthew Yglesias, have come in for similar abuse from Bouie’s Bluesky warriors. Their attacks involve “no engagement with his points,” Williams writes, “no seriousness, just ad hominem and lobotomized viciousness.” As if to confirm Williams’s assertion, one Bluesky user advised the author to “take a shotgun, make sure it is loaded, put the barrel in your mouth, and pull the trigger.”
Bluesky’s constant ratchet toward performative outrage doesn’t just make it an ugly place to hang out, it also makes the site surprisingly irrelevant to the big debates of our day. For years, Twitter/X served as a national bulletin board on important issues. Mainstream liberals used it as a kind of focus group to test-drive talking points—like the idea that Biden’s mental decline was “just a stutter”—that would soon be repeated throughout the media. For conservatives, the platform was a place where ordinary people could talk back to big shots, to speak truth to power, as lefties used to say. Despite pre-Musk Twitter’s heavy hand on the algorithm, conservative messages could still break through and undermine the liberal consensus. For example, today’s widespread pushback against DEI began years ago on Twitter, as activists revealed the nutty details of “anti-racist” training programs and classroom materials.
Conservatives and liberals didn’t always engage in high-minded debates on the platform. Far from it. But at least both groups could be aware of what the other side was thinking. A strong reaction on Twitter—such as to a dumb post that got “ratioed” by a flood of critical replies—could warn a thinker or political leader when he’d gone too far. Progressives gave all that up when they abandoned X for Bluesky. Left-leaning arguments lost critical mass on the bigger platform, while debates on tiny Bluesky are mostly out-of-sight-out-of-mind. It’s as if progressives decided to hold all their conversations under the Cone of Silence from the old Get Smart TV show.
In an X thread, one user of both platforms describes this evolution as “accidental self-kettling.” He’s referring to a tactic in which police “kettle” unruly protestors in a confined area, preventing them from spreading disorder through the city. Contained in their Bluesky kettle, progressives can yell all they want. But they can’t carry their message through the streets. And when people do listen to what they’re yelling, their words are so violent and extreme that most people tune them out. As a result, the left is losing its old ability to unify around certain talking points, or to organize online mobs demanding that this or that person be canceled.
There is a vibe shift in our culture today. People are removing the pronouns from their bios. Corporations no longer feel compelled to genuflect to the radical left. The NFL removed the words “End Racism” from playing fields. Jeff Bezos is bringing free enterprise back to the Washington Post. No one making these moves fears the left-wing backlash anymore. I’m not saying this is all due to progressives moving to Bluesky. But it helped. On Bluesky, no one can hear them scream.
Film still from Get Smart (1965), © CBS. All rights reserved.
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