Bluesky: The new Twitter or Truth Social for the left?
18 November 2024, 11:54
A view from a social media editor.
Twitter is a very different place now than it was when I started working in social media.
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Scrolling through the mentions on the LBC account now, it’s littered with racism and dead bodies.
There is an appetite for a replacement, for sure, but we’ve faced a few false dawns already.
Does anyone remember Mastodon? That was meant to be a ‘Twitter Killer’ when Elon Musk sealed the deal in 2022. But two years later, it has less than a million active users.
And we remember Threads, which became the fastest app to record 150 million downloads back in 2023.
A year later, it supposedly has 275 million active users, just 100 million short of its rival. But it’s not just the number of users that's needed. A key ingredient of Twitter has always been its political influence.
TikTok has vastly more users than Twitter but if you want to shape the news cycle, it’s more valuable to reach 10 journalists than 10,000 students. Twitter became the home of the politician and the journalist - and Bluesky has shown more than any other platform that it can be a home for the media-types.
With a chronological feed and more algorithmic controls, it feels more like 2015 Twitter than 2024 Twitter does.
And it’s adding a million users every day. Are we finally onto something?
Maybe not. Journalists and politicians have started to migrate over - but it’s a certain type of journalist and politician. I don’t think you’ll be getting a Kemi Badenoch or a Darren Grimes on there any time soon.
The ‘UK MPs starter pack’ has just one Conservative MP in it. That same pack has 25% of the Parliamentary Liberal Democrats.
And that’s the problem. BlueSky is being built on a reaction. Sign-ups have doubled since Donald Trump was elected and that’s not a coincidence.
Why would any right-wing journalist, politician - or member of the public - join a hostile environment? Sure, it’s not hostile in the way Twitter is, but you only need to look at the replies to LBC clips to see the difference. There’s quite a bit more abuse under a Nick Ferrari clip than a James O’Brien one.
So lots of people are getting excited about it, but it’s the same type of people.
There was once a perception that Twitter was too left-wing. That led to the creation of Parler and Truth Social, the latter of which became the home of Donald Trump’s streams of consciousness when he was in the social media wilderness after his attempted insurrection at the Capitol.
There’s a danger of a new version of that being created now with Bluesky. An echo chamber. A Truth Social for the left.
For the average user, to be honest, that’s probably alright. We’ve all been lectured about echo chambers, and how it’s important to see different points of view. But come on guys, scrolling social media shouldn’t be a job or a chore.
Yeah, fine, if you’re a journalist then an echo chamber can be dangerous or unhelpful (see November 2024). But people are tired. Regular users shouldn’t be expected to water down their nice wholesome scrolling with a bit of racism for ‘balance’.
The longing for a ‘new Twitter’ is motivated by a nostalgia for ‘old Twitter’. But how much of that is actually just nostalgia for pre-2016 normalcy? Has political discourse been so warped over the last decade that a new Twitter is impossible?
Bluesky has the best chance, but I’m not convinced yet.
You can find LBC on Bluesky here
And LBC's presenters, producers and reporters here
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James Perkins is the LBC social media editor.
LBC Views provides a platform for diverse opinions on current affairs and matters of public interest.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official LBC position.
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