The Bluesky "Echo Chamber"

Haven't we already had this conversation like ten times?

A lot of people seem very, very concerned that the American left is creating an echo chamber for itself on Bluesky. The platform, co-founded by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey (who is no longer part of the company), recently gained about 10 million new members and surpassed Meta’s Threads in terms of active members. That’s on the heels of the latest round of X users fleeing the Elon Musk-owned website.

In short, users say they’re leaving X because they’re tired of the low-quality content, bots, trolls, and harassment. An exodus of major advertisers has resulted in a lot more ads, often for poorer or more obscure products and services, resulting in a timeline that feels sketchy and an app that looks cheap. Almost like “Brand X” version of Twitter, if you will. Critics would have you believe that those users aren’t fleeing harassment, surveillance, a hostile moderation policy, or invasive AI crawlers but instead “can’t stand free speech.”

Let’s drill down into that a little bit.

Musk bought sole control of Twitter in 2022. He claimed that the platform was a festering pit of left-wing bias, and that he was going to “save it” and to stand for “free speech” and tolerance, because Twitter was “the global town square,” and it all perspectives had to be welcome.

(We can momentarily ignore the fact that Twitter, even at its height, had far fewer active users and less engagement than some other platforms, like Facebook — and the fact that under Musk, both active users and engagement on Twitter/X has dropped like a stone…so its claim to being the global town square is dubious at best.)

There isn’t actually much empirical evidence of a broad left-wing bias at Twitter before Musk arrived (actually, it seems like the opposite was happening, but that’s only if you pay attention to little things like third party studies), but the hard right turn since has been self-evident, and it has been driving away not only lefty activists, but also casual users and advertisers.

If you’ve been around the internet for a while, you’ll remember that back when Substack really started to take off, it was accused of being an “echo chamber” for the left. Twitter had just fallen into Musk’s hands and, despite his protestations and those of most of his mainstream media apologists, it was pretty clear that he was not going to be a fair broker of “truth” and “free speech” over there.

Anyone to the left of Reagan started looking for another place to congregate, and Substack was one of a number of promising candidates. It was particularly popular since it was one of the only ones that allowed bigger accounts to monetize their content.

That initial Twitter exodus was so lucrative for Substack that they launched Notes, a microblogging companion and direct Twitter competitor, to take advantage of the moment.

There was a lot of hand-wringing by centrist and establishment media types — largely on Twitter, unsurprisingly — that the left were fleeing to a “safe space” and creating an “echo chamber.” Of course, it wasn’t long before we all realized that Substack was just fine with platforming white nationalists and far-right conspiracy theorists. If this was meant to be an echo chamber, it isn’t a very good one.

There was also, briefly, a scare that Threads would be a left-wing echo chamber — although that largely faded, since that site is made up largely of engagement bait posts and brands trying to be funny. Basically, in the time since Musk transformed Twitter’s “public square” into a dedicated right-wing activism and propaganda hub, every new space that consumers see as a viable alternative gets branded a “left-wing echo chamber” until proven otherwise.

Bluesky in particular has fallen under attack because it is at least more friendly to sex workers than other mainstream social media platforms, which has led to a strong presence of queer and sex-positive people on the platform and a user base inclined to protect their interests. The Bluesky board have also responded to user concerns about trolls by allowing for blocklists that quickly and easily ban dozens of users in one fell swoop.

For the most part, the claims that these new platforms are “echo chambers” fall apart upon closer examination. But beyond that — why should it matter? This only seems to be a concern when it’s the “tolerant left” who are striking out for their own place.

The American right, frustrated that they were being deplatformed on Twitter and Facebook for hate speech and medical misinformation, has tried numerous times to create explicitly right-wing social media platforms (and I’m not even counting Musk’s decision to actually buy Twitter).

Before the Trump-owned Truth Social, there was Parler, and there have been others before and since. In some cases, they require photo ID in order to prevent “outsiders” from finding their way in and arguing with them or revealing what they’re talking about on more mainstream social media sites.

There are huge image board communities like 4Chan and 8Chan that cater primarily to right-wingers. Almost nobody in the mainstream media is foaming at the mouth over it. So, why is it that every time there’s a left-wing migration, the pundit class starts to lose its shit?

Speaking as a reporter, the increasingly decentralized nature of social media has become a pain in the ass to write about. You need to have accounts everywhere, many platforms don’t have a ready way to embed posts, and when you hear a big-name celebrity “just posted something,” there is no longer a single, monolithic place to go look and see what.

So, for pundits and media types, it’s super inconvenient to have their audience migrate to Threads and Spoutible and Mastodon and Bluesky and Hive and wherever else. Because it’s just…more work. It also reduces their follower count, and thus their clout, which gives them a case of The Sads.

That’s all pretty low-stakes, selfish stuff. But that’s genuinely most of what’s driving this. There’s also the idea that mass migration away from traditionally big platforms and onto smaller ones is likely to have an economic impact on the likes of Meta and X. Journalists and pundits often have tight relationships with those platforms, and can stand to lose money, or clout, or both, if those platforms are failing.

Corporate media is reeling right now. The economy is bad for the media in general, but left-wing discontent with how the media has mismanaged their coverage of Donald Trump for almost a decade now has started to boil over in ways that actually seem to impact the bottom line.

One of the reasons Bluesky has been able to overtake Threads is that many of those currently leaving Twitter are doing so due to frustration with the results of the U.S. election results…and Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg made sure to jump online right after the election and line up to kiss Trump’s ring, right along with other billionaires like Mark Cuban and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

Bezos, for his part, had just days before intervened to prevent The Washington Post from endorsing Kamala Harris for President, sparking a backlash against both Amazon and the newspaper that ultimately cost the Post over 200,000 subscribers. Once it was clear his executive meddling had cost the paper millions, he doubled down with an editorial that was even more poorly-received.

(No, I won’t link to it here.)

Bezos’s heavy-handed intervention, which inspired the ownership of at least one other major metropolitan newspaper to do the same thing, is a reminder that, to paraphrase The Nation’s Eric Alterman in his book What Liberal Media?, corporate-owned media is only as liberal as the conservative billionaires that own it.

Other examples? Look at the pattern of dishonest and frankly cruel coverage that the New York Times lobby at transgender people. Or consider the way supposedly left-leaning outlets like CNN cover economic issues. Virtually every major media outlet in the U.S. presupposes that largely unregulated capitalism is the best possible economic system. We accept at face value that a system where the stock market is performing well, but wages are stagnant and the standard of living is in decline, is a “successful” economy.

Even MSNBC, ostensibly one of the only genuinely progressive voices in the mainstream American media, sent their morning show hosts out to Mar-A-Lago to do a puff piece on Trump. Reports indicate that the hosts, who have sometimes been critical of Trump in the past, were worried about “retribution” and a lack of access in the president-elect’s second term, but to me, it’s unclear what genuine, journalistic purpose access serves when you can’t trust anything that comes out of his mouth anyway.

Because of the “liberal” media’s fixation on “balance” — which often gives equal time to lies and conspiracy theories in order to appease the powerful — their stories can be bland, unreliable, and even confusing. It also means that even outlets with an ostensibly progressive point-of-view are generally hijacked by the far right’s messaging machine.

Conservative media, on the other hand, has no such hang-ups about “balance.” While Fox News, the most notorious purveyor of not-actually-unbiased news, popularized the slogan “Fair and Balanced,” that’s really just lip service. They know who and what they are, and they have zero qualms about it. There’s an entire, massive conservative media ecosphere, of which talk-radio cranks and Fox News talking heads are actually among the more moderate personalities — and those sources will accept no dissent.

On the American right, there actually is a demonstrable “echo chamber.” Many Americans ever see news that reinforces far-right views, from Newsmax to Fox News to talk radio to The Joe Rogan Experience. They have their own dedicated social media platforms where, in some cases, they have gone out of their way to make it difficult for dissenters to join. Hell, when Trump was bounced off Twitter for inciting a riot at the U.S. Capitol, he started his own social media platform and demanded fealty from right-wing influencers and supporters.

Oh, yeah, influencers. A recent study indicated that mostly white, mostly male, far-right figures are disproportionately represented in the news influencer space, ensuring a new generation of young men are growing up in a conservative thought bubble.

Surveys show that the American public at large actually support progressive policies in a number of areas, including some that are expected to be gutted by the incoming Trump administration. The perception that Democrats are losing working-class voters isn’t because of “liberal elites,” but because voters themselves are profoundly uninformed, and huge numbers of people believed popular Biden-Harris policies were actually Trump policies instead. Sadly, that issue isn’t unique to the 2024 election.

In the weeks after details of Project 2025 — plans drafted by a right-wing thinktank that will shape Trump’s policy in his second term — started to leak on the internet, approval of the plan bottomed out, and Republicans started to run from it, with Trump consistently claiming that he had nothing to do with it, in spite of dozens of his former campaign and White House staffers working on it. The right-wing media ecosphere repeated Trump’s dishonest denials, and it worked: anywhere you go on social media, where liberals are complaining about Project 2025, there will be at least one middle-aged white guy with sunglasses in his profile pic yelling about how Trump doesn’t have anything to do with it, and claiming he does is “election interference.”

It isn’t just political issues that are impacted by the right-wing media echo chamber: public health policy didn’t used to be this way, either. As we look forward to a Trump administration where a bunch of anti-vaccine cranks will have their hands on the levers of power, remember back in 2020, when Trump believed mask mandates and quarantines would hurt the economy and, thus, his chances for re-election. He, his party, and their media enablers, took something that was not political to the vast majority of Americans and transformed it into a partisan issue, with conservatives around the country rallying around the cause of making sure our kids are less safe and less healthy. It’s telling to watch what the constant drumbeat of repeated lies will do to the minds of those subjected to it.

So — is Bluesky an “echo chamber?” It’s a little early to say. It certainly appears to lean left, although that has been moderating as its numbers swell by millions at a time. The real question, to me, is why the media and the pundit class seem to be so obsessed with, and upset by, the idea. Where is all of this outrage when American conservatives refuse to watch C-SPAN hearings and instead watch selectively-edited highlights on extremist websites for their news?

That outrage, that worry, doesn’t exist.

Corporations (including those that own the media), broadly speaking, want Republicans to win because Republicans will deregulate industry and slash taxes on corporations and the 1%.

Another profit motive lies in a left-wing conspiracy theory — but one that has a lot more credibility these days than it did when I first heard it. Back in 2022, a number of people told me they believed Elon Musk was buying Twitter in order to kill what was perceived as a key organizing hub for progressive activists. Events from Occupy Wall Street to Unite the Right to the 2020 George Floyd protests all saw progressive activists using social media to organize and plan. At the time, it seemed silly to me that Musk would spend billions of dollars just to influence U.S. politics. He was, after all, a largely boring corporatist outside of some shitty views on transgender rights and labor rights. In the time since, he has seemingly spent about another $100 million-plus to influence the Presidential election in favor of Trump.

And of course — while white, male conservatives make up most of the most influential political influencers, that isn’t true of many of the most successful and engaged-with accounts on social media. The companies that own, or have relationships with, social media standards like Twitter and Facebook stand to lose significantly if the likes of Taylor Swift and Dwayne Johnson jump ship for bluer skies. And while Johnson himself may be a bad example, it’s broadly true that artists lean left. That means if liberals are leaving in droves, some of the most popular accounts on social media platforms could be included in that count. And that costs people money.

Yes, my friends, the concern trolling over left-wing “echo chambers” is, at its core, about money. It’s about people who are already in power hanging onto their riches and their clout, and about the worry that they might lose a few pennies on the dollar if users (and celebrities) seek a more peaceful online experience.

Take those pennies with you and pay them no mind.