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“There is a great danger now,” one man wrote two years ago, “that social media will split into far-right and far-left echo chambers that will breed more hate and divide our society.”
You might be surprised to learn that the man in question was Elon Musk, who wrote these words when he bought the social networks platform formerly known as Twitter in October 2022, emphasizing the need for humanity to have a “common digital square” that is “warm and welcoming to all,” not a “hell of all against all.”
And yet… and yet.
Repulsed by the direction taken by both the now-named site X and its owner, an exodus from the platform is underway. That exodus — come on, Xodus! — has been particularly evident in Britain. having gained momentum Ever since Musk started posting things like “civil war is inevitable” during the riots that broke out over the summer, many have left the platform entirely, while others are just lurking. “I have an answer for this, but I’m afraid the discussion is only happening on Bluesky these days. [sic]”, I saw someone respond on X recently.
Either way, activity has fallen noticeably. Similarweb data shows that daily active users in the UK have fallen from 8m a year ago to just around 5.6m now, with more than a third of that drop coming since the summer riots. The same is happening elsewhere, and not just in places where the platform has been banned, such as Brazil. Over the same 16-month period, X’s active users in the US have fallen by about a fifth.
As disillusioned X users become, yes, ex-X users, they are finding their way to alternative sites. Since Mastodon has proven to be tech-unfriendly to many, these tend to be Meta’s Threads app or Bluesky, the platform that Twitter founder Jack Dorsey helped start. But while the former is winning in terms of absolute numbers (around 1.4 million daily active Threads users in the UK, compared to just over 100,000 in Blue sky — it is the latter that has grown the fastest over the past six weeks, and is consolidating as the preferred option for the media, policy experts, academics and the chat world in general.
It’s all very well that there’s a new place for these sorts of people to gather, but the problem is that the chatterboxes – however friendly, non-conspiracy theorist and non-overtly racist – tend to coalesce around fairly similar views, creating something of an echo chamber. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more like I’m at a drinking party in Stoke Newington than when I’m browsing Bluesky (even when I’m snacking on Perelló olives and truffle-flavoured Torres crisps at the authentic N16).
An even more fundamental problem is that no one at Bluesky really seems to… mind that they are in an echo chamber. When I told a friend, who is an enthusiastic Bluesky user, what I was writing about this week, she replied, “Oh, yes, but it is is “An echo chamber, that’s what people like, it’s lovely.”
Many rave about how similar the Bluesky platform is to “old Twitter,” which is telling in itself: In the old days of Twitter, progressives far outnumbered their conservative counterparts in terms of the amount of political posting on the platform, but that share has fallen dramatically since Musk took over. According to the British Election Study, in the run-up to the 2015 and 2019 elections, around 30 percent of the most progressive Britons posted about politics on the platform. This year, while the most conservative Britons were no less likely to post than before, the share of progressives posting on X has halved, to 15 percent — presumably that share has fallen much further since then, given that this survey preceded the riots.
In many ways, this is all pretty fair. Many of us use video-first platforms like Instagram and TikTok as a way to procrastinate and entertain ourselves; why shouldn’t text-based social media sites be a place to procrastinate and simultaneously relax and enjoy a filter? Why not have a place on the internet where you can go and have a nice, civil chat with someone who shares your worldview without the risk of running into a bunch of vile racist content?
In the end, it all comes down to whether or not you believe the “digital town square” Musk talked about when he bought Twitter can actually exist and, if it can exist, whether it is of any benefit to anyone.
I have argued previously that a “digital plaza” is a contradiction in terms —The Internet will never allow for the kind of engagement and understanding that comes from meeting a real person in all their raw, imperfect humanity.
But while it will always be far more chaotic and maddening than we would like, I think such a place is preferable to a series of isolated echo chambers. The irony is that the man who warned of the “great danger” of a split is the man most responsible for making it a reality.