Against Bluesky

Politics, echo chambers, and the difference between persuasion, propaganda, and performance on social media

Over the past decade or so, many academics and pundits have looked to social media to explain the alarming surge in popularity of illiberal, right-wing, populist politics throughout the Western world.

In such analyses, two concepts have been highly influential: “misinformation” (see also “fake news” and “disinformation”) and “echo chambers”.

The first draws attention to the prevalence and dangers of false, misleading, and incendiary content in driving declining trust in institutions, attacks on democracy, conspiracy theorising, hateful ideas, and other troubling developments. According to this analysis, social media is distinct from legacy media in that it provides an ideal breeding ground for such misinformation, which allegedly spreads faster than accurate information online. By taking advantage of this fact, sinister foreign influence campaigns and domestic demagogues have managed to infect the masses with bad ideas, driving them to support dangerous politicians and policies.

The second draws attention to one of the alleged features of social media platforms that greatly exacerbates this problem and creates new ones: their tendencies to enclose users within information silos in which they are shielded from contrary perspectives, driving polarisation and radicalisation. Here, the core concern is that the engagement-maximising character of social media algorithms interacts with psychological factors like tribalism and confirmation bias to pull communities into comforting epistemic bubbles, exacerbating their “susceptibility” to congenial misinformation and driving them to develop beliefs increasingly unmoored from reality.

As I have pointed out in previous writings, neither of these explanatory frameworks has been very helpful in understanding troubling political developments in recent years.

At least when it comes to very clear-cut misinformation, most people encounter very little of that content online, and the fringe of active social media users who encounter a lot mostly do so because it aligns with what they already believe.

When it comes to echo chambers, there is simply not much evidence that the problem is worse online than offline, and the genuine—and genuinely worrying—echo chambers that do exist online seem to be driven more by self-selection into such communities than by “the algorithm".

For these reasons, much of the panic surrounding social media and misinformation has been excessive. Contrary to conventional opinion in some quarters, online misinformation is not the most serious near-term global risk, and it does not seem to be the driving force behind complex, large-scale sociopolitical trends.

Nevertheless, the fact that popular discourse surrounding these topics has been alarmist does not mean there is nothing to worry about. Online misinformation and echo chambers are genuine problems, even if the scale of these problems has frequently been exaggerated.

Moreover, it is reasonable to worry that both problems have worsened considerably since Elon Musk took over Twitter, not least because Musk himself—one of the most powerful people on the planet and the biggest account on the platform—incessantly posts and amplifies false and misleading content. (Even his own “non-woke” large language model, Grok, is forced to acknowledge this).

Given this, it is puzzling that many of the same people who have spent nearly a decade worrying about online misinformation and echo chambers have responded to this development by abandoning X en masse to create their own progressive echo chamber on Bluesky.

The puzzle of Bluesky

First, if you think that X increasingly functions as a dangerous vector for right-wing or outright fascist misinformation, presumably you would think it is important that informed progressives spend time on the platform refuting (“fact-checking”) that misinformation and improving the quality of information there.

Second, if you think echo chambers are dangerous, presumably a process in which progressives abandon one of the world’s most popular social media platforms en masse greatly increases its tendency to function as a right-wing echo chamber favourable to the spread of misinformation and radicalisation. Likewise, you would presumably be worried about inhabiting a progressive echo chamber of your own.

However, the puzzles do not stop there.

If you spend time on Bluesky, as I sometimes do, you will find an endless stream of posts documenting the sheer awfulness of many of the actions and trends associated with right-wing populist, authoritarian movements around the world. These posts are generally high-quality and insightful. Reading them, I find myself agreeing. Apparently, however, so does everyone else on Bluesky.

And this makes me wonder: Who are these posts for?

Persuasion, propaganda, performance

In thinking about political communication, it is helpful to contrast a kind of ideal speech situation with two prominent forms of defective speech.

In the ideal situation, people participate in the public sphere by sincerely expressing their viewpoints to try to persuade those they disagree with, keeping an open mind that they might be mistaken—and being more persuasive precisely by projecting this openness. This is politics through rational persuasion, a precondition of which is that the speech is directed at those who hold different views. It involves respecting one’s audience as fellow democratic citizens one potentially has something to learn from.

Politics as propaganda

One alternative to this model maintains the focus on persuasion but abandons any concern with sincerity, truth-seeking, rational argument, or respect. It involves politics as propaganda.

There is no better example of politics as propaganda than Elon Musk’s approach to political communication. It is obvious to any moderately well-informed, fair-minded person of any political viewpoint that Musk’s only goal in posting or amplifying content is to spread whatever narrative he thinks would advance his interests. He exhibits a psychopathic disregard for ideals of honesty, rationality, evidence, or intellectual virtue. There is nothing particularly new about this style of politics (hence why the popular label “post”-truth is misleading), but it is real nonetheless.

Politics as performance

Another alternative maintains the focus on sincerity found in rational persuasion but abandons any concern with persuasion. Here, the goal of political communication is not to change an audience’s mind but to advertise the state of the communicator’s mind. It is politics as performance, treating political communication as a tool for signalling the communicator’s virtues, social identities, or loyalty to specific political factions and causes.

There is no better example of politics as performance than Bluesky.