Social Media Is Navigating Its Sectarian Phase

Summary

On September 1st, the author and statistician Nate Silver wrote a post on X diagnosing a new condition: “Blueskyism,” so named for the decentralized social network that has emerged as a competitor to what used to be Twitter. According to Silver, Blueskyism embodies a newfangled ideology comprising “all the characteristics that make progressivism unappealing to normal people”—the same qualities, Silver argues, that prevent Democrats from recouping electoral favor. As with any good social-media bit, Silver later doubled down, fleshing out the concept in his newsletter, Silver Bulletin. Bluesky, designed to be a nontoxic social network, has been overwhelmed by “aggressive policing of dissent,” “moral micropanics,” and an insularity derived from its population of academics and experts. Silver is not active on Bluesky, but his posts on X are often screenshotted and cross-posted for rage bait on the platform. Basically, Silver admitted in his newsletter, he is critiquing liberal “wokeness,” and blaming a single social network for it.Silver is not completely wrong; there is indeed a culture of recursive, reactionary scolding on Bluesky that makes it less fun than it could be. (On the platform, X is euphemistically referred to as “the other place.”) It’s impossible to generalize about the entire population of the site—many of Bluesky’s users do not post in English and do not engage with American politics—yet it has developed an identity as a haven for liberals in the aftermath of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and Donald Trump’s reëlection as President. More so now than five or ten years ago, which social network you use is a byword for your personal politics, and you can’t use a particular platform without agreeing with, or at least tolerating, its ambient ideology. Social networks, particularly the text-driven platforms that host political debate, have grown more sectarian as politics, in turn, have become more online; if you’re active on one network, you might, like ...