People are Weird About Bluesky

Defending Free Speech is a Practice, Not an Identity

(Audio Version here)

There is currently a great deal of animus against the social media platform, Bluesky, involving arguments that don’t make much sense on closer inspection. This was summed up for me in a real-life conversation I had recently that went like this:

Him: People who use Bluesky just want a left-wing echo chamber

Me: Well, not all of them. I don’t. I want to keep up with what the people who left X are saying.

Him: Then you’re in an echo chamber.

Me: Well, I’m not, because I use X as well. Much more than Bluesky, actually. I use both because I don’t want to be in an echo chamber & instead to have access to the widest range of political views. This is quite important for my work.

Him: OK, that’s fair enough for studying the woke, I suppose. But anybody who joins Bluesky to use it as a social media platform just wants to be in a woke echo chamber. People who value free speech and viewpoint diversity join X.

Me: But people can join both. Don’t you think that necessarily gives one access to a wider range of views than just joining one?

Him: No, because people on Bluesky will just block you or get you banned if you disagree with them. There’s no support for viewpoint diversity and free speech over there.

Me: Granted, but unless they all block you or you do get banned, you’ll still necessarily have access to a wider range of views if you join two social media platforms with different ethos than if you just join one.

Him: No, because the ethos of one supports viewpoint diversity and free speech and the ethos of the other does not. Use Bluesky for research purposes if you wish, but if you want to support viewpoint diversity and free speech, you should stick with X and boycott Bluesky.

I think this confuses support for viewpoint diversity and freedom of speech as a principle with actually accessing diverse viewpoints (including those which don’t uphold the principles of viewpoint diversity).

People can, of course, legitimately object to Bluesky, its censorious policies and authoritarian users to an extent where they decide to boycott the platform on principle until such time as it supports a diverse range of views and upholds principles of free speech. This is a perfectly ethical and reasoned stance. I’d be wary, however, of assuming that anybody who uses Bluesky, either exclusively or as one of their social media platforms, is an enemy of free speech and viewpoint diversity, or placing them in a political camp and attributing a whole set of principles and values to them .

People join Bluesky for various reasons, but dislike of Elon Musk, X as a platform, or its policies is likely high among them. While many welcomed the reinstatement of accounts banned under previous ownership, X now has a number of large, legitimately far-right accounts promoting white supremacist, misogynistic, and anti-LGBT views. If one of these accounts quotes a post negatively, it can trigger a flood of abusive replies lasting for weeks. I don’t believe banning such views is an effective way to defeat them and keeping them visible allows them to be challenged, cited, and shown to people inclined to doubt they have a significant presence. But not everyone on social media wants to be caught in the culture wars. People who leave platforms to avoid being targeted by the illiberal right aren’t necessarily rejecting viewpoint diversity or free speech. In the same way, those who blocked abuse from the authoritarian left and criticized the pile-ons of ‘woke’ cancel culture weren’t hypocritcally betraying those values, despite what those of the woke who are terminally confused about how free speech works may have claimed.

Elon Musk is a highly polarizing figure and was closely aligned with the Trump administration, although the honeymoon period of that now appears to be over! Choosing not to support Musk’s platform doesn’t equate to rejecting freedom principles. I initially joined Bluesky to keep up with some American “Never Trump” liberal Republicans who had left X. They didn’t want to enrich Musk and were sceptical that a platform run by a Trump-aligned billionaire with 220 million followers could avoid becoming de facto state media. They didn’t abandon their commitment to free speech or viewpoint diversity; they were just no longer convinced X upheld those values. I think I am still reasonably able to choose whose posts I see as long as I remember to switch the feed from “For you” to ‘Following,’ but I do think it wise for anybody who wants to address politics and culture to ensure they don’t get all their news and discussion of it from X.

It is important to remember that supporting free speech and viewpoint diversity is a practice based on consistently liberal principles, rather than a political side or a tribal identity. On a few occasions, when I have criticised Elon Musk, usually on the grounds of truthfulness, somebody has responded accusing me of hating free speech as though the man and the principle are synonymous. This is not the case and it is worrying that some people seem to think it is. It was a problem when the “woke” movement claimed the label ‘Social Justice’ for itself, and then accused all critics of it of being opposed to a just society, thereby shutting down any productive discussion about whether the movement was effectively and ethically advancing that goal. A very similar problem is likely to arise if people decide that Elon Musk, X, the populist right or the anti-woke symbolise free speech and any criticism or rejection of them is therefore an opposition to free speech. It will polarise people who may, in reality, share a commitment to freedom principles and the value of viewpoint diversity, and make it very difficult to evaluate whether those are being upheld or whether the mission is sliding.

I think this was the error my recent acquaintance was making. He appeared to have accepted, rather uncritically, the idea that X symbolised free speech and viewpoint diversity while Bluesky symbolised the rejection of those values. This resulted in a rather confused position that if I really supported viewpoint diversity, I would restrict whom I speak to to people who are willing to support a platform run by Elon Musk. He was rather resistant to the idea that I could actually gain an understanding of a wider range of viewpoints if I also spoke to people who weren’t, and only with reluctance conceded that my use of Bluesky could be legitimate as long as it was for scoping out the enemy and reporting back, not for communication.

There is a strange irony in the fact that to support freedom of speech, we need to tolerate the speech of people who don’t support freedom of speech, and to reap the benefits of viewpoint diversity we need to engage with the views of those who reject the value of viewpoint diversity. The best alternative media platforms in the heterodox and anti-woke spaces have tried to do this and invited people who reject both to join them on podcasts and at events. They are very seldom successful, but I think it is important that at least some of us remain open to this and seize the opportunity when it arises.

It is foolish to try to discourage people from engaging with others on Bluesky, whether they are anti-authoritarian Never Trump libertarians, non-authoritarian leftists and centrists who are repelled by the illiberal right on X or authoritarian Critical Social Justice activists. It is especially disappointing to see critics of wokeness engage in a kind of guilt-by-association fallacy in an attempt to deter people from doing so. It makes absolutely no sense to claim that while X is the place to be if one wishes to avoid becoming trapped in an echo chamber, also joining Bluesky necessarily makes one guilty of being in one.

This is not an attempt to get anybody to join Bluesky or to suggest that anybody has a responsibility to do so. I only occasionally visit myself because I find it rather dull. Many of us feel, with justification, that we already spend too much time on social media and do not see enough value in Bluesky to justify adding it. It is also entirely reasonable to boycott the platform because you do not support its stance on freedom of speech and viewpoint diversity, which is an entirely different position to claiming that by entering it, one automatically becomes an enemy of those values. If you dislike Bluesky for any reason, you should absolutely decide against joining it, but please try not to be weird about those who do?