Over the past four days I’ve been called a delusional fool, a nincompoop, a paid sycophant, an establishment shill and, simply, “scum”. The reader can decide whether or not these epithets are justified. But it will probably not come as a surprise that they were delivered on X, formerly Twitter.
Most came from people enraged that I had described the outgoing Green Party TD Catherine Martin as the most consequential arts minister of the past 30 years. Only a very small number engaged with the article I’d posted to X. All ignored the point of the article, that at a pre-election event, Martin’s policies were supported by the representatives of six other political parties which would go on to secure 85 per cent of the seats between them in the new Dáil. That did not suit the narrative of “traitors”.
Why bother posting on X any more? Like others, my engagement with the platform has dwindled to the occasional desultory link to a particular article or podcast. Even that seemed increasingly pointless, as the algorithmic changes wrought by Elon Musk reduced any traffic those links generated to a trickle.
Recently, though, another option presented itself: Bluesky. The Twitter-resembling platform has seen a spike in new users in recent months, paralleling the decline in X’s user base. Since the summer, in particular, a lot of people seemed to have made the move.
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I was sceptical. When enthusiasts said Bluesky was like “old Twitter”, were they talking about the freewheeling, idea-bouncing, intellectually stimulating Twitter I remembered from 2014? Or did they mean the scolding, conformity-enforcing, intolerant one I recalled from 2021? Twitter had been wrecked by its previous owners before Musk wrecked it anew.
I finally joined Bluesky a month ago, and the experience has been mostly benign. The site doesn’t feel as if it’s been jerry-rigged, like X, to feed your prejudices and stoke outrage. There are better tools to curate what you see and what you don’t. It is, admittedly, a little bland and limited in scope, but new people – most of them refugees from X – appeared to be showing up all the time.
Inevitably, though, growth brings problems. Controversy erupted this month following the arrival on the site of Jesse Singal, an American journalist and podcaster who has written articles for publications including the Atlantic and the New York Times questioning the scientific basis for youth gender medical treatments such as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.
The response from some users to Singal’s arrival was virulent. He was called a paedophile and told he should kill himself. Some posts fantasised about him being shot in the face or beaten to death with hammers. Suddenly Bluesky didn’t look like the kinder, gentler place that had been promised. It looked a lot like X.
Within a few days of arriving, Singal had become the most blocked person on the platform. A petition demanding his permanent removal currently has 25,000 signatures. Blocklists have been set up which allow people not just to block him but block anyone who follows him. There is a lot of talk about safety and language-as-violence, some of it from people who actually used very violent language. It’s all very 2021-vintage Twitter.
Child transgender healthcare is a highly contentious subject that raises serious medical and ethical questions about the appropriate treatment of vulnerable young people. Many parts of Singal’s overall critique have been echoed by health policy experts in other parts of the world. In the UK a report by paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass recommended that these treatments be suspended. Last week health secretary Wes Streeting announced a permanent ban on puberty blockers for gender treatment across the UK, including in Northern Ireland, where it has been accepted by Sinn Féin (placing the party in the awkward position of supporting diametrically opposed policies on either side of the Border).
These are complex issues. But online, the debate is often poisonously didactic. One side sees bad actors everywhere infecting institutions with gender ideology. The other sees writers like Singal – and, in some cases, doctors like Cass – as purveyors of transphobia and hate.
It isn’t hard to discern parallels between the most extreme and vocal parts of these two through-the-looking-glass world views. Wokeism (as it doesn’t like to be called) and the red-pilled reactionary right each propose a way of seeing the world as it “really” is, as opposed to what a sinister cabal wants you to believe it is. Both espouse an illiberal rejection of nuance or diversity in favour of a highly moralised adherence to a set of immutable truths. Some posts on both sides are so extreme they give rise to legitimate concerns for the mental health of the authors.
In Fault Lines, their history of American political polarisation, Kevin M Kruse and Julian Zelizer argue that since people increasingly see only the most extreme versions of opposing views on any given platform, they end up with a highly distorted perception of the range of opinions that actually exist on a given issue. That in turn feeds further polarisation. Non-partisan think tank More in Common has shown how these extreme fringes drive out the moderate or the politically uncommitted (the people formerly known as the majority) from online political spaces. That has a number of consequences.
It gives a misleading picture of what the median voter actually thinks about controversial subjects such as youth gender medicine. It can also lead to ideological capture of political movements by committed activist minorities claiming to represent the interests of much larger groups in society. The impact can be seen in the fractious arguments that have erupted over the future direction of the Democratic Party in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory.
Some argue that all of this is overblown, that X is a spent force with an ageing, shrinking base, that Bluesky remains marginal and that both are dwarfed in terms of audience share by the now-dominant video platforms of YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. That does not tell the full story. Elon Musk has demonstrated that even a diminished platform like X can wield massive political influence on a hyper-fragmented media landscape.
For Bluesky, the challenge now posed by this controversy – and the others that are sure to follow – is whether it can hold the line on its aspiration to be an open and respectful space or just end up as Musk’s black mirror.
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