Eight years ago I entered an essay competition run by the FT’s Gideon Rachman inviting writers to embody a history student looking back from 2066. In my version of the future, social media users on opposite sides of the culture war not only inhabited different filter bubbles but, by the mid-2020s, used entirely different platforms.
As the culture war would continue to expand, and because right-wing views are more likely to cause offence, I imagined that a heavily censored platform would emerge to serve users on the left. In response, a competitor would arise promising zero content moderation under the banner of free speech, but that this would in practice be used almost entirely by people on the right.
The pathway there has been more complicated. No new platform was needed to serve the American cultural left because the main players, run by Californian liberals, went all-in on it. Facebook, for example, was accused by former employees of routinely boosting left-wing stories and suppressing those on the right.
Since this leftward lurch happened on existing platforms, where people had invested time building networks, most of us went along with it – often grudgingly, judging by recent electoral outcomes. As a result new platforms on the right, such as Parler and Truth Social, failed to attract moderate or even centre-right voices and so quickly degenerated into extremism.
The fall of Twitter
It was against this background that Elon Musk conducted his hostile takeover of Twitter, now called X, two years ago. Unlike many, I initially welcomed his freewheeling approach to content moderation, which he articulated as banning illegal speech and nothing else. With right-wing ideas finally tolerated, and large numbers of centrist and left-wing people already in the tent, we might finally get a social platform where all views could be heard.
It's unfortunate, then, that X appears to be collapsing – and not because of content moderation. While the usual suspects grumbled about the rise in hurty words, the centre held for more than a year. But eventually the decision to fire legions of staff came back to bite Musk, revealing that he had underestimated the difficulty of fighting misinformation and of maintaining a good user experience.
Misinformation is rampant, and Musk himself – whose tweets are relentlessly promoted into everyone’s feed – has spread it. Neither is it a purely right-wing phenomenon: The wake-up call for me came in October last year, when a left-wing US congresswoman shared a decade-old image from Syria’s civil war that falsely claimed to portray the results of an Israeli attack in Gaza.
Even so, we stayed. We were journalists and politicos, we were savvy professionals, and we could learn to cut through misinformation. For raw breaking news, X was – perhaps still is – the best source.
The killing blow was something altogether more mundane: the user experience. Whether by firing too many staff, trying too hard to promote his own content or trying to rush monetisation, Musk’s leadership has ruined the platform.
The recommendation algorithm is completely broken, meaning you must choose between a chronological feed of people you follow – a long-outdated concept – or a seemingly random stream of mostly promoted content. Trying to open the comments beneath a tweet now reveals unrelated spam, undeclared gambling ads, and frequently porn.
Another use for social media is to share articles, which tend to be more nuanced and better fact-checked than native posts. But this too has been demoted by the algorithm. Every week after publishing The Leopard, I promote the essay with identical posts on X, where I have more than 8,000 followers, and Bluesky, where I have about 400. The latter now regularly generates more engagement, despite my following being 20 times smaller.
Bigger publications have found the same. Last month The Guardian announced it was quitting X; and while it did not miss the opportunity to grandstand about “disturbing content”, the decision was no doubt made easier by the fact that Bluesky was by then delivering more traffic.
A missed opportunity
For the past month or so, users have been abandoning X in droves and flocking to Bluesky, in what many commentators have described as a turning point. After a few false starts over the past year, many people have now put down roots on Bluesky, helped along by clever innovations such as ‘starter packs’ of accounts to follow.
A few weeks ago, without ever really deciding to, I found myself posting on Bluesky as my default, and duplicating only certain posts on X – a reversal of my previous pattern. Many other journalists and politicos in my network have done the same, often for reasons to do with engagement and the user experience rather than their personal politics.
But not everyone. Many right-wing accounts are still resolutely using X while those on the left have mostly made the switch. Worse, Bluesky has been zealously blocking right-wing accounts that do try to come over. It has offered no explanation for its decisions, but they seem to be based on little more than poking fun at liberals or stating uncomfortable truths.
With everything still in flux, Bluesky has an opportunity to renounce censorship and open itself to users of all political persuasions. Failure to do so will result in a situation much like the one I predicted eight years ago: two tribes, each on their own platform, unable to speak to each other.