Bluesky has become a safe space for liberals seeking to avoid the triggering presence of opposing views since the Trump reelection. The relatively small site now has over 30 million followers (in comparison 260 million for X and 3 billion on Facebook). Now, however, users like billionaire Mark Cuban are complaining that Bluesky is just another intolerant echo chamber on the left and some are reportedly returning to X.
Billionaire Mark Cuban was one of the early champions of the site, writing “Hello Less Hateful World” in joining the site in November 2024.
At the time, some of us criticized the premise of the Bluesky devotees. Many supported the anti-free speech and censorship efforts during the Biden Administration. Bluesky offered a replication of the echo chamber in higher education, where liberals can go unchallenged or uncontradicted. This included some of the most intolerant figures in media, academia, and the government.
Now, Cuban and others are experiencing what many of us have lived through in higher education for years, an orthodox environment where even marginal disagreements are treated as litmus tests.
Cuban this week decried that “Even if you agree with 95% of what a person is saying on a topic, if there is one point that you might call out as being more of a gray area, they will call you a fascist etc.”
In his post on Monday, Cuban notes that “the replies on here may not be as racist as Twitter, but they damn sure are hateful. Talk AI: FU, AI sucks go away. Talk Business: Go away. Talk Healthcare: Crickets.”
“Because the Musk and Trump haters are the largest and most passionate group, the result is something of an echo chamber where it’s hard to get positive engagement unless you’re saying things progressives want to hear — and where the negative engagement on things they don’t want to hear can be intense.”
The problem is that many users went to Bluesky because they did not want to be challenged in a free-speech environment. It is a site for those who do not wish to be “triggered” by opposing views. If you only watch MSNBC and post on Bluesky, you can live within a hermetically sealed liberal space without the fear of contradiction or opposition.
Ultimately, 30 million users are not a significant threat to social media companies like X or Facebook. The hope that Bluesky would drain X of revenue has not materialized. Analysts are reporting that X appears to be rebounding after years of boycotts and ad revenue could grow by 17.5% to $1.31 billion, with global ad sales expected to rise by 16.5% to $2.26 billion.
Bluesky will still be able to capitalize off the draw as a safe space draw for the left with uniformly favorable media coverage. It also offers a concentrated membership of liberal users for Democratic politicians and pundits. However, it does little in terms of impact outside of that space.
That is the reason why most liberal politicians and pundits are still actively posting on X. Some belong to both — engaging a broader audience on issues on X while retreating to the safe space of Bluesky for reaffirmation.
However, it is harmful to the left in further insulating themselves from reality. Take a typical user like a Harvard professor who watches MSNBC and reads the New York Times. She then goes to work at a university with a faculty that has less than three percent of conservatives or Republicans and less than ten percent conservative or Republican students. She then goes to Bluesky to converse within a liberal ecosystem on social media. It is a virtual bio-containment tent that filters out any discordant elements.
The reason that many on the left were shocked by the election results is that they lived within these protected spaces. They have removed themselves further from the majority of this country, disengaging with anyone who objects to their priorities and values. Within that echo chamber, opposing views become more intolerable and shocking.
Bluesky will continue to be a draw for free-speech-phobic and viewpoint-intolerant users. Fortunately, most people want to be part of a larger discourse and engage with the world around them, despite the presence of trolls and hateful commentators.
Cuban’s call for greater diversity of thought on Bluesky is unlikely to alter the culture of a site that is maintained as a safe space for liberals. That cloistered environment only increases sensitivity and intolerance for opposing views. It is akin to developing an immune deficiency from a lack of exposure to certain elements.
If Cuban and others want robust debate, they will not find it in digital safe spaces like Bluesky.
Amazing that anyone would expect Bluesky to be a less hateful place given the user base; where’s the clown emoji
Hypocrisy from woke Marxist Democrats? Shirley, you jest!
BACK ON TOPIC , it appears Ms Padilla has let the cat out. Loyalty to the new nation of New California no longer loyal to the United States but send us your monyee.
Nice bullet train, Newsom and nice fire service Bass. Glad to hear the Chief sticks with the law.
They’ve been pocketing the money for the homeless,hopeless…
BTW Kings aren’t elected every 4 years. You should have continued reading Breyer…
Reign in assembly and keep the speech.
Happy 250th Birthday to the US Army, to President Trump and Flag Day. As an immigrant family, we would excitedly hang our American flag every June 14th from our house roof to show how much we, Cuban refugees, loved America.
🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
As to George Soros funding Agitprop organization, Indivisible to orchestrate anarchy in hundreds of cities today under the title “No Kings Protest”, a quote from Thomas Jefferson comes to mind:
I do not know whether it is to yourself or Mr. Adams I am to give my thanks for the copy of the new constitution. I beg leave through you to place them where due. It will be yet three weeks before I shall receive them from America. There are very good articles in it: and very bad. I do not know which preponderate. What we have lately read in the history of Holland, in the chapter on the Stadtholder, would have sufficed to set me against a Chief magistrate eligible for a long duration, if I had ever been disposed towards one: and what we have always read of the elections of Polish kings should have forever excluded the idea of one continuable for life. Wonderful is the effect of impudent and persevering lying. The British ministry have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, and what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves. Yet where does this anarchy exist? Where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusets? And can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honourably conducted? I say nothing of it’s motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be 20. years without such a rebellion.[1] The people can not be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13. states independant 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure. Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusets: and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite to keep the hen yard in order. I hope in god this article will be rectified before the new constitution is accepted.
In a letter dated November 13, 1787, to William Stephens Smith, the son-in-law of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson used the phrase “tree of liberty”
https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/tree-liberty-quotation/
TL;DR: FAFO
‘anarchy in hundreds of cities today under the title “No Kings Protest”’
Where were these “No Kings” protestors when the Biden administration was issuing Executive Orders hand over fist to circumvent the other two branches of our government? Does the fact that one or more unelected bureaucrats in that administration other than Biden were running that show, using the autopen (with Biden as a figurehead puppet monarch) somehow make turning the US into a autocracy OK? And, regarding the second premise of these protestors, are the billionaires backing them (Soros, Gates, Zuckerberg, Hoffman etc.) superior in some way to any persons of similar means supposedly supporting Trump? If so, how, exactly? The hypocrisy of the Left continues to astound, even as it becomes the order of the day. They reject all appeal to moral and ethical principle, except on the rare occasion when such can be twisted to suit their purpose; in which case they passionately pretend to embrace it.
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
One always hopes to secure a maximal ratio of tyrants to patriots when putting Jefferson’s maxim into practice.
It is amazing. Even the greatest soi-disant defenders of egalitarianism and democracy are never more than a stone’s throw from book-burning.
LAME Conspiracy theorist, too!!
No kings, just thugs will take to the streets Saturday.
Trump”s thugs are the ones behaving badly. Just ask Senator Padilla. Happy birthday to the Horse’s Ass-in-Chief.
Maybe the stupid Senator shouldn’t break the law and look like a fool.
Exactly. It was the secret service and security detail who took him down as he rushed the podium.
FAFO
*. If this is the start of WWIII then there are other interests to pursue for the short term.
Racism writ large in the Iran Israeli war. Thank you Israel for putting yourselves in great harms way for the rest of us.
Adieu and Floyd, I hope you’re on a cruise and all the cats are fat and happy.
Walmart facing furious boycott as billionaire heiress promotes anti-Trump protests amid LA Riots
Tomorrow: paid insurrectionists.
“Walmart facing furious boycott . . .”
I don’t get that one. Christy Walton has nothing to do with the company.
“Christy Walton has nothing to do with the company”
Well, except in the sense that she probably owns, or is otherwise the beneficiary of, a large amount of Walmart stock. But that would be a ridiculous basis for boycotting a business.
#9. Exactly! The better reason is that they’ve poisoned America with Trojan Horse cheap, defective, and most often dangerous, Communist slave labor produced junk.
“they’ve poisoned America ”
Meh. For the most part, they have given the market exactly what the market demanded, at prices acceptable to that market, and profited handsomely by it. That is the role of a merchant, especially one that caters to value-conscious customers. Should those customers have been more vigilant about what they purchased? No doubt that case can be made. Full disclosure: I patronize WM for canned and boxed groceries, along with some very basic apparel items, because their prices are hard to beat. There are other items that they carry (fresh meat and produce in particular) that you couldn’t pay me to consume.
Now you know why Mossad took down the Twin Towers with controlled demolition on 9/11.
To bring the U.S. in.
Take down Iraq.
Clean out Afghanistan.
Convert Syria.
And eviscerate Iran.
Through 9/11, Mossad scrubbed up the entire region in one fell swoop.
Well played, Israel, well played.
LAME Conspiracy theory!!
“LAME Conspiracy theory”
On the specifics cited, correct. However, I think there is substantial circumstantial evidence that there was quite a bit more to the incidents of 9-11 than have been disclosed to the American people. When will the entire story be revealed? That has been promised by this administration and Congress, but I suspect what we will actually get are more Dan Bongino “Epstein did commit suicide; the lack of a video showing anyone else killing him definitively proves that” moments. Ditto for the Ft. Knox gold bullion audit promise.
You are an idiot. Mossad even so strong and smart that they can do anything they want to anyone at anytime. I guess you think the Jews are super beings.
Israel can pinpoint the location of dozens of Iranian military and nuclear leaders in a country they have never been to yet our own FBI can’t figure out who planted the 1/6 pipe bombs, the white house cocaine or leaked the Dobbs decision to the public