Bluesky is just methadone Twitter

ALSO: Some thoughts on how D*nald T*ump won

Today — November 13th, 2024; a day that shall live in infamy — the Guardian, Britain’s highest performing international newspaper, from a digital perspective, exited the Twittosphere. “This account has been archived,” @guardian now reads, ending (for now) a long relationship with the site that has seen the left-wing paper rack up 10.8m followers. That audience has played a significant role in turning The Grauniad (ask your grandpa) into the 6th biggest news website in the world, with 303.8m visitors this September alone. 

Throwing away a direct line of communication to almost 11m people is no small decision, especially for a paper struggling with diminishing domestic influence (The Guardian no longer submits to the ABC print circulation figures, but the last time it did, in 2021, suggested it had 108,687 readers of the physical newspaper). “We think that the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives,” the publication said, in a statement that is now its pinned tweet, a sort-of digital tombstone. “X is a toxic media platform and its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse.”

Now, the Guardian is doing precisely what I’ve suggested that all the media should be doing: divesting themselves of a reliance on unreliable social media platforms. Back in August, I wrote a piece called “The Media Love Affair with Twitter Must End” and I stand by every word of that. Not because I think that Twitter/X has become a toxic sewer (though it has), or that the proliferation of bots and spammers makes the service all but unusable (though they have), but because it is now an intentionally anti-journalistic project.

For a long time, the relationship between Twitter and the media was symbiotic. Twitter became the essential forum for breaking news, precisely because of the proliferation of hacks on the platform. Rather than laboriously churning out a 500-word piece, sending it off to editors (then sub-editors), then publishing it and having the news spread, journalists realised that they could quickly stick their flag in a story by just… tweeting the news. And so, it became the fastest way to find out what was going on. Political journalists, in particular, would often surrender their scoops to the timeline Gods, all in service of building a following. Which they did — in huge numbers. And the media ecosystem responded by turning Twitter follower count into an important metric of journalistic success. Your number of followers became an valued factor when pitching stories, not to mention when interviewing for jobs.

Some context. There are basically two sources of traffic to an online publication: Google and social media. And journalism has spent a decade finessing both, turning SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and socials management into major parts of any news organisation. The former consists of trying to fluff Google’s slippery algorithm so that your links come top, or high, when people use obvious search terms (*cough* such as: IS BLUESKY BETTER THAN TWITTER?), while the latter is a game of managing the fickle preferences of different sites, and trying to use them to drive traffic away from them.

And this last bit is the key point to this first half of my piece. Twitter (or X) has decided that it is imperative that it keeps users on its site. It doesn’t want links to news publications, when it is pushing, heavily, a Premium service where you can blog natively. It doesn’t want links to YouTube when it is pushing a Premium service where you can upload videos, again, natively. I suspect that, in the next few months, we will see the integration of more native components — podcasting or audio would be an obvious one, a referrals shop, a la TikTok, would be another — that will turn Twitter into a one-stop shop for all your media needs. Links have been deprioritised in the algorithm, to the point where publications are experimenting with using images, first, to hook readers (the same is true on Facebook). In short, Twitter’s business interests are now entirely at odds with the rest of the publishing industry. And so the continued reliance on it — both as a source of cachet for journalists, and a traffic driver for social media managers — was doomed.

But what’s going to take its crown as the thing that gets political journos out of bed in the morning? The flavour of the month is a site called Bluesky. I first heard about it when a client told me that the publication they work for was having huge success on Bluesky, almost overnight. They felt that users looking for political news and analysis had become sick of the low-grade content on Twitter and were migrating to a platform where the news they wanted was more easily digestible, and the OnlyFans spam more easily filterable. So I signed up, and you can follow me, if you like.

A potted history of Bluesky: Bluesky was founded, back in 2019, as a research project into decentralised social networks, by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. After Elon Musk bought Twitter, it cut ties with the Bluesky project, and Dorsey, ultimately, returned to the site he’d co-founded. It wasn’t until the spring of 2023 that Bluesky became available, originally as an invite-only service, on mobile devices, and not until February 2024 that it became open to everyone. Since then it has grown rapidly and built momentum. In the last week, since the US election, it is said to have gained 1m followers, bringing the total number to around 15m. Small, still, but emerging from its cocoon. (This is a joke, because its logo is a butterfly). 

I understand the excitement that journalists who have spent a lot of time and energy on Twitter over the past decade feel at the emergence of Bluesky, which is a dupe of early Twitter functionality. We’ve got our website back, they seem to be saying. The migration, while still incomplete, has been swift; top bods on Twitter are reportedly gaining thousands of followers on Bluesky within days of joining the service. It feels like some of what was lost in the Musk era of X has been regained. And yet, I have a nagging concern that this is simply replacing one problematic forum with another.

The first issue I have pertains to how much sense there ever was in turning social media into an arbiter of journalistic value. I have no problem with people cultivating a personal audience, nor with having a number value assigned to that. But what I saw was a lot of people becoming addicted to the short-form back-and-forth of Twitter. People argued with readers, in a way that was often unedifying. People freelanced opinions, routinely, on areas outside their expertise. People developed strange parasocial relationships with their audience, which often led to difficult and dangerous interactions.

I left Twitter at the start of this year after incurring the wrath of a particular, and very vocal, segment of its user base. I felt, suddenly, like the limited use I got out of the platform was wildly outweighed by the amount it exposed me to abuse and harassment. In years gone by, the journalistic process was roughly: write incendiary article, publish incendiary article, have angry readers write to your editor, have the editor decide whether to bin it or pass it on. Now though, there is a sense that readers are peering in your living room window, maintaining a direct line of communication and willing, often, to try to actually ruin your life. And the only reason that I can see why so many journalists stuck with it is that they are addicted to that tiny dopamine burst of affirmation. 

My second concern is that Bluesky just defers the issues that Twitter’s disintegration has raised. Namely, the consequence of outsourcing so much responsibility, in a traffic-obsessed marketplace, to third-party platforms. Bluesky seems good — for now — and seems like it wants to support journalists. But as its user base increases, so too will its costs — and value. The company was founded as a public benefit LLC but took on $8m in seed funding in summer 2023, after which it became a public benefit C corporation. The difference is nuanced, but it shows a willingness to evolve the project from its origins — not to mention the fact it is now accountable to a legion of investors.

It is not unreasonable to suspect that Bluesky might, at some point, reach the same conclusion that Twitter has (and that, to be fair, many other social media platforms have too), that being a native content source is preferable to being a link aggregator. At that point, we’re back at square one. The collapse of industrial trust in Twitter/X ought to be a moment to spark a total reevaluation of the reliance on social media (and Google) for traffic generation. The need for more secure, more independent, routes of travel from audience to broadcaster cannot be underplayed. New products, targeting this relationship, need to be built. Switching from Twitter to Bluesky changes solution, but it doesn’t solve for the original problem.

And so, in all the joyful noise about Bluesky, I feel a bit like a man without lips at a punch party. Being freed (temporarily: I’m sure they’re coming too) from the spambots shilling drop-shipped tat, or videos of drunk women fighting, is a relief. But replacing one addiction — one over-reliance — with another is never sensible. Not sensible from a human well-being perspective, and not sensible from a business one. It feels like we, as an industry, got hooked on a dangerous drug, and are now shooting up on some harmless replacement — the methadone of this process — without really understanding the implications.

Because sometimes it’s better to go cold turkey — or to replace your intravenous opioid habit with something more benign, like crocheting or stamp collecting.

Ok, last call, follow me on Bluesky or TikTok.

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And now, a quick note on Donald Trump’s victory and the so-called “podcast election”.

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I live in London, and so last Tuesday I went to bed at a normal time and set a bunch of alarms. 3am, 4am, 5am, 6am.

The story of President Trump’s re-election unfurled for me in bleary-eyed glances at my phone. That first feeling that maybe this wasn’t going to be particularly simple. That second realisation that the dominos were following in favour of the Republicans. That final, doom-laden, comprehension that this wasn’t ever going to be a close-run thing. At 6am, I went downstairs and watched the television, staring blank-eyed at history unfolding before me.

I’m not a political pundit — and I’m not an American — but I really felt that Vice-President Harris would win. This is only in part because my tiny European brain can’t comprehend wanting to vote for a man like Donald Trump. It’s also because I felt like the Trump campaign was approaching the election in the same way that beer companies approach a Superbowl commercial. Make as much noise as possible, and watch the ripples spread. Wassssssup? Nothin’, just watchin’ the game, havin’ a Bud.

The Trump campaign demonstrated a near total lack of scruples in terms of where they put their candidate. In the week before the election, they allowed him to do a 3-hour sit-down interview with podcaster Joe Rogan. That’s basically unheard of in election history: allowing your candidate to put himself up for scrutiny lasting as long as a viewing of Schindler’s List. And yet, Team Trump did it, and Rogan played ball, rarely removing his tongue from Trump’s boot for long enough to ask a challenging question. And all this has led to the suggestion that Trump just managed to amplify his message more effectively. The 2024 Presidential election is being called, in some summaries, “the podcast election”, “the TikTok election” or “the internet election.”

I want to challenge the idea of amplification, because I think it simplifies a vast, uncontrollable trend. Amplification makes the process of political communications sound like it’s simply about being as noisy as possible, ensuring that as many people hear your messages as possible, when, in point of fact, it’s almost the opposite. You might want to call it signalling, you might want to call it selective amplification — I prefer to call it narrativisation.

Take, for example, the issue of reproductive rights in America, an issue that the Democratic campaign was relatively (though not unrestrainedly) vociferous about. The basic belief was that a slender majority of Americans are pro choice, and therefore it would be a vote-winning policy. Simple enough, as a calculation. And yet every time a liberal politician trumpeted a pro-choice position — amplified the noise there — they were also boosting a pro-life message. Every Democrat who went on TV and said “we want to defend your reproductive rights” was sending a message to voters who agreed with them on that issue, and those that disagreed with them.

This is part of the reason that good campaigns often avoid simple binaries (and why referenda often throw up more puzzling results than complex elections). If Trump comes out and says “we’ll fix the economy” he is not also inadvertantly making a signal to voters who don’t want the economy fixed, because such voters don’t really exist. Even the more polarising statements — deportation of illegal migrants, for example — are blunt positions in a nuanced debate. The noise doesn’t come with an unwanted echo.

And yet, for all that I’ve just said, I felt like the Democrats were much more judicious about their messaging that the Trumpists. They believed — incorrectly, as it turned out — that the “not Trump” message would be strong enough to deliver the White House. The GOP’s campaign, meanwhile was carefully calibrated to combat that. And that’s where the process of narrativisation comes in. The purpose of the Trump media blitz in the last months of the campaign — appearing with YouTubers and podcasters, at sports stadia and on social media — was to create a new narrative about Trump’s role in the election. It’s ok to vote for Donald Trump, was the most important message in town.

After January 6th, 2021, it wasn’t immediately clear that it would ever again be within the pale to publicly support Donald Trump. To do so was to associate yourself with Q-anon weirdos, violent thugs who injured 174 police officers, and the nutter who attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband. That sort of thing. The prospect of Trump 2.0 had resided, because the narrative was now running against him: he had lost to a weak Democrat candidate, Joe Biden, and soiled the office by association with a militia of intemperate hicks. It was not unreasonable to anticipate getting egged if you wore a MAGA hat in public, such was the strength of anti-Trump sentiment. The Republican establishment, who had never wanted Trump, was looking forward to normality returning. Maybe Trump would even end up in jail.

And yet, here we are. The narrative shifted. Much ink will be spilled in the years to come on the memefication of the Trump campaign. Here in the UK, Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader at the 2017 and 2019 General Elections, was sometimes referred to, ironically, as “magic granddad”. Trump had some of the same energy: the cut-loose American patriarch, pontificating loudly after a Jack and coke. The fact that much of this renaissance was conducted by kids who were scarcely old enough to be politically conscious in 2021 was no coincidence. Their credulous boostering of the Trump campaign offered validation to a generation of American voters who needed little encouragement to return a Trump vote to middle American normality. If the kids are getting behind Trump, they would say, and they’re the wokest generation ever(!!), then the guy is clearly back in the mainstream.

To the European mind, the way that the US election unfolded was, frankly, bizarre. Most of Europe is in thrall to macho technocrats like Keir Starmer, Olaf Scholz and Emmanuel Macron — politicians who have a transparent policy platform and a command of the detail. Neither Republicans nor Democrats were keen to discuss policy in this election cycle. They traded slogans, and Trump’s were more effective. “Fix the economy”, “deport the illegals”, “make America great again” — they were all headlines for a plan of action that was never published. When you have a policy platform, you have something to amplify; when you have a candidate with a hatful of vapid slogans, you need to build a story.

Donald Trump’s victory is a huge, and depressing, feat of narrativisation. A man who had already had a fruitless crack at the Presidency, who faced legal threats and assault allegations, who had fomented violent insurrection, who was (/is) old and doddery and sketchy on even the simplest of briefs — in the space of a few months, he was turned into an avuncular ex-President, a man with wisdom and experience, and a connection to the American heartland.

Once that dial was shifted, everything fell into place. Every election result is the sum of its constituent parts: every campaign message, every leaflet, every voter interaction, and, eventually, every vote. But not all those parts are weighted equally, and in this election by far the most consequential unit was a vote for Donald Trump. Normalising that act was all that mattered to the Republicans. They didn’t need to talk about the economy or immigration, healthcare, crime or education, because Brand Trump already signalled in those directions to the American electorate. They just had to make it feel normal and sane and strategic to vote Donald Trump. They had to allow him to interact without fear of interruption. They had to show him kicking back with different generations, different ethnicities, different genders. They didn’t even need to talk politics — they just had to treat him like a respected former incumbent of the highest office in the land.

And that’s what digital media can do. I remain unconvinced by its ability to tap into previously untouched voters, to open new communities to political exposure. But I do, very much, buy its role in shifting the energy of the campaign. It’s a powerful tool, but one that incumbents will always find hard to utilise.

And with the dice already loaded against political stability, that’s a scary notion.