Social Media Is Navigating Its Sectarian Phase

On September 1st, the author and statistician Nate Silver wrote a post on X diagnosing a new condition: “Blueskyism,” so named for the decentralized social network that has emerged as a competitor to what used to be Twitter. According to Silver, Blueskyism embodies a newfangled ideology comprising “all the characteristics that make progressivism unappealing to normal people”—the same qualities, Silver argues, that prevent Democrats from recouping electoral favor. As with any good social-media bit, Silver later doubled down, fleshing out the concept in his newsletter, Silver Bulletin. Bluesky, designed to be a nontoxic social network, has been overwhelmed by “aggressive policing of dissent,” “moral micropanics,” and an insularity derived from its population of academics and experts. Silver is not active on Bluesky, but his posts on X are often screenshotted and cross-posted for rage bait on the platform. Basically, Silver admitted in his newsletter, he is critiquing liberal “wokeness,” and blaming a single social network for it.

Silver is not completely wrong; there is indeed a culture of recursive, reactionary scolding on Bluesky that makes it less fun than it could be. (On the platform, X is euphemistically referred to as “the other place.”) It’s impossible to generalize about the entire population of the site—many of Bluesky’s users do not post in English and do not engage with American politics—yet it has developed an identity as a haven for liberals in the aftermath of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and Donald Trump’s reëlection as President. More so now than five or ten years ago, which social network you use is a byword for your personal politics, and you can’t use a particular platform without agreeing with, or at least tolerating, its ambient ideology. Social networks, particularly the text-driven platforms that host political debate, have grown more sectarian as politics, in turn, have become more online; if you’re active on one network, you might, like Silver, get blamed for what you say there on another. Thus, people’s choice of which platform to use has become more fraught. A decade ago, it made sense for users to toggle among different social networks that offered different content formats. Now that every platform offers a similar admixture of text, images, and video, choosing where to spend your time feels more like picking your preferred flavor of brain poison.

Silver casts Bluesky as “a peculiar online neighborhood that someone wouldn’t encounter unless she takes a wrong turn.” But the dynamics of X, where Silver posts more or less daily, are far more politicized by design. In the twenty-tens, Twitter hosted a wide range of political viewpoints; it was known as much for distributing activists’ documentation of protests as for serving as Trump’s bully pulpit during his first Administration. After Musk acquired the site, in 2022, he laid off its moderation staff, incentivized particular forms of posting (often from Musk’s favored right-wing influencers), and tweaked users’ feeds toward promoting Grok and xAI, Musk’s artificial-intelligence business. (X was formally merged into xAI this year.) No one can credibly claim that X under Musk is trying to be neutral, or build a better political arena, as Bluesky, whatever its flaws, has earnestly tried to do. The politics of social platforms is determined not just by the opinions of its users but by the underlying structure of the network. Bluesky, part of the decentralized internet, is slower paced and caters to niche interests, rewarding internecine fights over minutiae, whereas X is deliberately chaotic, encouraging the gathering of follower-armies and ideological insult-comedy for an audience that may be largely made up of bots. X-ism, as we might call it, involves the race for engagement at all costs and trolling as praxis, and it is currently winning out.

Silver might be comforted by the fact that even many liberals who had fled for Bluesky seem to be embracing X-ism once more, creeping back onto the platform with a certain furtive guilt. The space has been marked safe for their return, in part, by Musk’s retreat from the public stage in the months since he split with Trump and left DOGE to its own devices. It’s easier to perform on Musk’s stage when the man himself is no longer there at all hours shouting incessantly. In March, the release of “Abundance, ” by the writers Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, sparked a wave of debate on X over the most effective anti-Trump messaging. New pro-liberal publications, including Jerusalem Demsas’s The Argument, have joined in. (As during, say, the Super Bowl, it’s more fun to post when there’s something exciting to collectively fixate on.) Last month, the California governor Gavin Newsom began using his office’s X account to mock Trump’s Truth Social posting style, publishing messages that mimicked the President’s rambling all-caps missives. The resulting positive press for Newsom has served as permission for other liberal politicians to rear their heads on X in his wake.

I suspect that left-leaning journalists and editors are migrating back to X not because of the ideological tenor of Bluesky but because they miss the attention arms race. If X-ism is preferable to Blueskyism, it’s because X users don’t have to work as hard to reach people. On the internet, a bigger megaphone is still considered a better one. Yet parsing the distinctions between Bluesky and X has a burgeoning air of futility. The truth is that text-dominated social networks are largely decaying across the board. According to Bluesky’s open-source data, the number of daily posters on the platform has been declining each month since its peak in January of this year, following Trump’s Inauguration (though it is still four times as large as it was last year). X has been forced to release some of its internal statistics owing to new technology regulation in the European Union; the data, from earlier this year, show that the site has lost around ten per cent of its European user base, around eleven million accounts, since August of 2024. Meta’s Threads app is growing, thanks to its ongoing support from Instagram, but since its launch, in 2023, it has not, at least by my recollection, generated a single major cultural moment or meme.