(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) Just days after voters rejected the astroturfed, pop-up campaign of Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris in favor of President-elect Donald Trump’s promise of a new “golden age,” recalcitrant leftists such as Joy Reid, Don Lemon and the England’s Guardian newspaper voiced their protest by finally deleting their X (née Twitter) accounts.
Outraged by X owner Elon Musk’s increasingly close ties to Trump, and the promotion of free speech on the social-media platform, mainstream media outlets instead attempted to create buzz over Bluesky.
But after roughly 12 million left-wingers, following the cues of their celebrity thought-leaders, tearfully fled to the new site—ostensibly fearing Musk’s persecution and censorship—they immediately began making demands that Bluesky revamp its policies to accommodate their delicate snowflake sensibilities, ZeroHedge reported.
The mass migration of wokes from X to Bluesky is already impacting "safety" culture and censorship on that platform. pic.twitter.com/QE6HA0Shcw
— i/o (@eyeslasho) November 16, 2024
In a single day’s time, the platform’s “safety” team disclosed that it had received some 42,000 “reports,” equivalent to nearly 12% of all the censorship demands it had received in the previous year.
The site claimed it was prioritizing the removal of “CSAM,” or child pornography, although doing so risked alienating the robust “MAP” community that may have been seeking refuge there.
Subtly letting all their perv users know that CP is readily available on Bluesky
— JFKsSideChickTX (@EyesWideOpenTX) November 17, 2024
Ironically, the platform’s original purpose was to effectively recapture the halcyon independence of social media’s salad days—on an invite only basis.
Bluesky was first conceived and developed by Twitter creator Jack Dorsey in 2019, while he was still CEO of Twitter.
Although nominally in charge, the free-spirited Rasputin cosplayer increasingly found himself chafing under the yoke of responsibility.
Supplanting his original vision of Twitter as a virtual public square, the site had rapidly morphed into the vanguard of the global thought-police, quietly colluding with intelligence agencies like the FBI and CIA to influence Americans’ political opinions and second-guess their decision-making abilities on matters such as personal health choices.
First, we’re facing entirely new challenges centralized solutions are struggling to meet. For instance, centralized enforcement of global policy to address abuse and misleading information is unlikely to scale over the long-term without placing far too much burden on people.
— jack (@jack) December 11, 2019
Unable to please either the Right or Left, Dorsey departed from Twitter in November 2021, subtly signaling his frustration over the board’s growing demands for content regulation and the platform’s waning profitability due to conservative boycotts.
not sure anyone has heard but,
I resigned from Twitter pic.twitter.com/G5tUkSSxkl
— jack (@jack) November 29, 2021
After Musk purchased the platform 11 months later, at a cost of $44 billion, Dorsey reaffirmed his frustration regarding the board-driven censorship in more direct terms.
In an interview with Pirate Wires, Dorsey applauded Musk’s move to restore free speech by taking the company out of the hands of woke shareholders.
“The board has always been a problem at that company, and I was happy to see it end,” he said.
“But there was only one way for it to end, which is going private,” he continued. “And I think that’s the greatest act.”
A few months before Dorsey bowed out of Twitter, his side project, Bluesky, made its first move toward spinning off into its own platform by hiring CEO Lantian “Jay” Graber.
Graber promptly incorporated the company and took it public in October 2021. Nonetheless, the platform remained “invitation only” until last February, when it first began to capitalize on the Left’s desperate attempts to cancel Musk.
As of Wednesday, Bluesky boasted around 20 million users, according to USA Today, up from around 12 million in October.
But at least one user has left the platform: Jack Dorsey.
Even though many mainstream media articles have used Dorsey’s name to promote it as a throwback to the pre-Musk Twitter, Dorsey long ago deleted his account, according to a September 2023 post on a Reddit board dedicated to the Bluesky community.
A search of Dorsey’s name produced the following summary of the Redditors’ conclusions via Google’s AI-generated fact-finder: “Jack Dorsey left Bluesky because he’s a racist, that supports racism and lost interest when moderation tools were created to manage racist accounts on Bluesky.“
Meanwhile, crestfallen though they may have been on the inside, X users endured the mass exodus of their online comrades with a stoic determination to carry onward.
Some compared the culture at Bluesky to a convention of the Democratic Socialists of America.
😆😂
This is NOT a parody. Here's a look inside what occurs at the Democratic Socialists of America convention.
H/T @Bigfoot_USA pic.twitter.com/PCIuLgtIOR— 🔴♦️ ULTRA-MAGA Lori 🇺🇸 Patriot♦️🔴 (@LiberatedCit) July 5, 2023
Others pointed out that leftists already tried—and failed—to create a hyper-regulated Twitter alternative.
While an estimated 275 million worldwide users have signed up for the Meta-backed Threads (compared with X’s more than 600 million), data from September indicated that only around 33 million were active, and users spent, on average, 3 minutes daily on the platform.
I thought threads was the big competitor to @X ?
What does blue sky have that threads doesn't?— Libertarian-ish (@DrinkRedbull1) November 17, 2024
Conservative Twitter alternatives likewise languished during the Dorsey era. After Twitter canceled the account of then-President Donald Trump in early 2021, citing the Jan. 6 uprising at the U.S. Capitol, the site Parler saw a massive surge in new users, only to find itself deplatformed on the servers and app stores run by Amazon and Apple.
Trump’s own Truth Social network has, at times, seen strong investor interest, with its stock value attached in many ways to Trump’s own political capital. However, the company itself has remained largely unprofitable. Trump continues to use it as the primary platform for his posts, but he has once more reactivated his iconic Twitter account since kindling his friendship with Musk.
As for Musk—who got practice for his new role overseeing the Department of Government Efficiency by paring down the dead weight on Twitter’s employment rolls—he runs no risk of being overtaken as the world’s wealthiest individual anytime soon, despite the tragic departure of ex-employee Don Lemon.
Don Lemon also leaving X… it's like Christmas came early this year. pic.twitter.com/sAe0lcAwhG
— Shipwreck (@shipwreckshow) November 13, 2024
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/realbensellers.
