Why Is The Legacy Press Mad About Bluesky?

Hint: It's not because it's a "liberal echo chamber."

Democracy did not die in November of 2024 but the assholes have their knives out and it's up to us to keep them from their bloody work. Despair and surrender are what they want. Resistance is what they’ll get. Stay strong. We beat the fascists once and we’ll fucking do it again. 

The First Annual (allegedly) Black Friday Sale starts…tomorrow! What? No one ELSE is waiting!

It’s been amusing to watch the meltdown over the rapid growth of Bluesky and the mass exodus from Twitter. You can find me on Bluesky here! It was only a matter of time until one of the various Twitter clones caught on and the migration kicked into high gear.

Why Bluesky and not any of the others? I couldn’t even begin to guess. Its decentralized ownership that makes it difficult, if not impossible, for a piece of shit like Elon Musk to buy and ruin it? The ease of blocking trolls, thus depriving them of the oxygen they need to exist? The starter packs of accounts to follow that make it easy for new users to build the exact newsfeed they’re looking for?

I’m sure someone smarter than me will figure it out in the near future. And they’ll post about it on Bluesky.

I popped up on Bluesky some time ago but there weren’t enough academics, news organizations, and media watchdog types to faithfully recreate my Twitter experience. And then there was. Very much so. After the election, millions of Twitter users, including an awful lot of users with large followings said, “Fuck this shit” and bounced. They either made or started using previously fallow Bluesky accounts and it snowballed VERY quickly.

Oh. We remember this. This is what Twitter was like before the Nazi shit.

And that’s when the whining started from outside of Bluesky. So. Much. Whining.

Now, it was totally expected to see the right throw a temper tantrum. It’s really all they know how to do. These are the thinnest of thin-skinned babies and they have been crying for literally the entire existence of social media that they’re being oppressed.

I WANT SPECIAL PRIVILEGES NOW OR I’M GOING TO SCREAM!!!

Remember, these are people who made an entire alternate media system to push propaganda because the legacy media didn’t cater to their lies enough. They created an entire alternate set of social media for the exact same reason. The problem, they quickly realized, is that without libs “to own,” there was no point in having Nazi Twitter or Nazi Facebook.

Sure, it was fun at first arguing with their fellow Klansmen about which of them hated Black people the most in their little echo chambers. But that got boring, fast. They need to be able to scream their hate at us or their lives are just empty.

Well, more empty, I guess. God, imagine living the wasteland of a life these fucking losers go through where the only thing they have to look forward to is trying to troll people online? Anyway!

Over the last couple of weeks, the right has been rending its garments that we’ve been leaving Twitter in droves. They’ve been foaming at the mouth that we’re “running away and sealing ourselves in an echo chamber,” which considering the number of purpose-made right-wing media sites is a very amusing accusation. Almost a…confession, one could say.

They’re even angrier that they can’t get a foothold on Bluesky. Not for lack of trying, mind you. But the block feature is more robust and Bluesky admins are not shy about labeling MAGA accounts as misinformation and banning them. They don’t want the toxicity. Yeah, MAGAts are hopping mad about this.

The Atlantic dissects this reaction in detail but the short and sweet of it is here:

Liberals and the left do not need the right to be online in the way that the right needs liberals and the left. The nature of reactionary politics demands constant confrontations—literal reactions—to the left.

Yup! That’s it exactly. I could spend the next 10 years of my life never once speaking to a Republican, writing about them, or thinking about them, and I could carry on a full, productive, and happy life. This goes double for MAGAts.

I could argue about which kind of universal healthcare would work best for our economy. I could debate how much the minimum wage should be. $20 an hour? $25? Which would guarantee a living wage? And what about Universal Basic Income? How much should we be taxing billionaires? 1960s levels or 1950s? What is the proper mix of renewable energy? Should nuclear power be a part of it or just part of the transition?

Did you know the Opinionated Ogre has a weekly podcast? It’s true! New episodes every Wednesday! Catch the latest episode here:

I could write another 1000 words of that before I even brushed up against something even remotely controversial like prison reform or how to handle immigration. I would never need to reference the right in any way whatsoever.

The reverse is not remotely true. The right is incapable of these kinds of conversations without the left. In that sense, they are very much like white pride in that white pride only exists as a declaration of “not being Black/Latino/Asian/etc.” It has no meaning without another group to contrast to. Other prides do not discuss anything but themselves and their heritage. White pride can only discuss how happy they are not to be The Other.

How curious that the right wing and white pride go together like peas in a pod. But of course they do. The right has no ideology beyond owning the libs. They cannot govern except in opposition. They have no proactive agenda. Nothing. They can only destroy what the left has built or spend their time passing laws to inflict harm on whichever new group they’ve decided to hate this week. There is no belief they hold today they cannot reverse tomorrow.

The right hated and despised Russia until Russia hated and despised the left. Now your average Republican masturbates to pictures of a shirtless Putin.

The right screamed “PROTECT THE CHILDREN!!!” until Donald Trump nominated a literal child trafficking pedophile to be Attorney General.¹ Then they were all in. When that blew up in Trump’s face, MAGAland fell to their knees and cursed the heavens. Very sad.

The right hated “activist judges” until their extremist judges started to literally rewrite the Constitution. Now judicial activism is God’s Will.™

The right was enraged by any kind of censorship, especially the imaginary kind they invented so they could claim persecution. Now? They’re going to soil themselves as Trump and his fascist regime quite literally use the power of the United States government to shut down media outlets and organizations that are critical of them.

They have no core ideology outside of power and “making libs cry.” It really is not a joke that if the left started a campaign to arm every Black American, the right would immediately rediscover their love of gun control.

The American right is not a political movement so much as a funhouse mirror reflection of the rest of us. We can and will exist without them. They cannot exist without us.

And this brings us to the other group that has been in a bit of a snit over the Twitter exodus: The legacy media. I know, It took a really long time to get here. Sorry.

A week or so after the election, I noticed a lot of people on Bluesky commenting that the press was wringing its hands over so many of us moving away from Twitter. I didn’t really pay it any mind because, meh, fuck them assholes.

But the complaining continued. Little snarky comments about, yup, Bluesky is an echo chamber. Then there was this cutesy little joke from the New Yorker:

LOL! So funny! Now, there’s a bit of truth to it because, for the last three weeks, I’ve seen a lot of people talk about how happy they are to be here. The part the New Yorker skips over is that we’ve all been talking about how refreshing it is to log on to see the news, even unwelcome news, and be free of the screaming hate and abuse and Nazi shit from Twitter.

Meanwhile, the screaming hateful Nazis from Twitter are furious because there’s less of us to abuse which makes it harder for them to spread their bile. And so, too, I think, is the legacy media. You see, they all NEED Twitter to spread Republican propaganda (bolding mine):

Of course, if X becomes more explicitly right wing, it will be a far bigger conservative echo chamber than either Gab or Truth Social. Truth Social reportedly had just 70,000 users as of May, and a 2022 study found just 1 percent of American adults get their news from Gab. Still, the right successfully completing a Gab-ification of X doesn’t mean that moderates and everyone to the left of them would have to live on a platform dominated by the right and mainline conservative perspectives. It would just mean that even more people with moderate and liberal sympathies will get disgusted and leave the platform, and that the right will lose the ability to shape wider discourse.

The conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who has successfully seeded moral panics around critical race theory and DEI hiring practices, has directly pointed to X as a tool that has let him reach a general audience. The reason right-wing politicians and influencers such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nick Fuentes, and Candace Owens keep posting on it instead of on conservative platforms is because they want what Rufo wants: a chance to push their perspectives into the mainstream. This utility becomes diminished when most of the people looking at X are just other right-wingers who already agree with them.

That’s why Elon Musk spent $44 billion to buy Twitter. He didn’t care about censorship. He cared about taking control of a social media platform with an outsized influence on both the media (a lot of reporters lurk on Twitter) and the public conversation. He took control and weaponized it with the full cooperation of that same media.

But once we’re gone and Twitter is just Nazis and reporters. The reporters will leave to follow where the smart and interesting and influential people are. The academics. The celebrities. Other reporters. Nazis are neither smart nor interesting. Elon Musk is as boring as it gets. The world’s richest man screaming for attention because he’s sad and lonely² is about the most pathetic thing I can think to watch.

But the legacy press doesn’t want the right to lose such a powerful weapon. They are heavily invested in aiding and abetting the GOP which, as always, is good for their bottom line. During the four years Trump was on Twitter spewing hate and nonsense, reporters gobbled up his tweets and wrote thousands of articles. It was easy work, requiring just the absolute minimum of effort and guaranteeing clicks and eyeballs.

When Trump was banned from Twitter after January 6th, those Golden Eggs disappeared. A lot of tears were shed in newsrooms across the country that day. Truth Social was a short-lived beacon of hope. Trump tweets! But there was that Nazi platform problem. No liberals signed up so no one cared. Trump could post all day long and absolutely no one gave a shit. You can’t “own the libs” if there are no libs watching.

And so, the press is putting its nose up in the air. Some…a little harder than others:

Two things to point out here:

1. Twitter has actual Nazis. Like, for real actual “kill all the Jews!” Nazis. But, yeah, Bluesky has “the literal most annoying people on the planet.” Go fuck yourself, Silver.

2. Nate Silver likes to tout his bonafides as a neutral pundit and has complained about how the left is becoming so out of control blablabla. It’s funny, though, because he knows he can’t spell out “Bluesky” too often in his tweets or Elon Musk’s platform, you know, the one dedicated to free speech and all that, will punish him.

The reality is that Silver knows his presence here as a right-wing pundit, because that’s what he is, would be greeted with universal derision. But others in the legacy press are unhappy because the unstoppable brain drain from Twitter will leave it useless as a propaganda tool.

I don’t know what the tipping point is but Bluesky has 22.5 million users as of this writing. It appears to be adding another million every couple of days and as the largest non-Nazi accounts abandon Twitter, that process will accelerate because why waste your time on a platform where all the smart and interesting people have left?

Expect to see Musk threaten lawsuits and the Trump regime to “investigate” Bluesky in an attempt to shut it down. Don’t be surprised if the legacy press looks the other way. Anything that threatens their moneymakers on the right is a danger to be dealt with. We’ll see how well that works out for the fucking fascists. I think it might take more than four years to erase the First Amendment.

Until then, I’ll be flying the friendly Blueskies while I watch Twitter crash and burn.

There are 343 days until the first Blue Wave and it starts in Virginia, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. 

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year. Thank you for everything!

I swear! The Opinionated Ogre Black Friday Sale starts tomorrow. You should really wait to subscribe.

1. And that was after decades of ignoring Trump’s well-understood proclivities for perving on little girls, including his own daughter. But, you know, MAGAland HATES groomers! Unless they’re Republican groomers.

2. Keep having kids, Elon. None of them will ever love you because love is a two-way street and you are incapable of loving anyone but yourself, you broken apartheid clown.