“There is currently great danger,” a man wrote two years ago, “that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society”.
It may surprise you to learn that the man in question was Elon Musk, who wrote these words when he bought the social media platform formerly known as Twitter back in October 2022, stressing the need for humanity to have a “common digital town square” that was “warm and welcoming to all”, not a “free-for-all hellscape”.
And yet ... and yet.
Repelled by the direction that both the site now called X and its owner have taken, an exodus from the platform is under way. That exodus – oh go on then, Xodus – has been particularly apparent in Britain, having gathered steam 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 merely lurk. “I have an answer to this, but discussion only on Bluesky these days am afraid [sic],” I saw someone reply on X recently.
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Either way, activity has fallen discernibly. Data from Similarweb shows active daily users in the UK have dropped from eight million a year ago to only about 5.6 million now, with more than a third of that fall coming since the summer riots. The same thing 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.
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As disillusioned X users become, yes, ex-X-users, they are finding their way on to alternative sites. With Mastodon having proved off-puttingly techy for many, that tends to either be Meta’s Threads app, or Bluesky, the platform that Twitter founder Jack Dorsey helped to start. But while the former is winning in terms of absolute numbers – about 1.4 million daily active users of Threads in the UK, compared with just more than 100,000 for Bluesky – it is the latter that has grown the most rapidly over the past six weeks, and that is cementing itself as the top choice for media types, policy wonks, academics and the broader chatterati.
That there is a new place for such people to congregate is all well and good, but the problem is that the chatterati – very nice and non-conspiracy-theorising and non-overtly-racist though they may be – tend to coalesce around some quite similar viewpoints, which makes for a rather echoey chamber. I’m not sure I have ever felt more like I’m at a Stoke Newington drinks party than when I’m browsing Bluesky (including when tucking into Perelló olives and truffle-flavoured Torres crisps in actual N16).
[ No, Elon Musk will not be a trillionaire by 2027Opens in new window ]
An even more fundamental problem is that nobody on Bluesky seems to actually mind that they are in an echo chamber. When I told a friend, who happens to be an enthusiastic Bluesky user, what I was writing about this week, she replied “oh yes, but it is an echo chamber, that’s what people like about it, it’s lovely”.
Many enthuse about how like “old Twitter” Bluesky is, which is telling in itself: in the old days of Twitter, progressives far outnumbered their conservative counterparts in terms of how much they posted about politics on the platform, but that share has fallen dramatically since Musk took it over. According to the British Election Study, in the run-up to both the 2015 and 2019 elections, about 30 per cent of the most progressive Britons posted about politics on the platform. This year, while the most conservative Britons remained no less likely to post than before, the share of progressives posting on X had halved to 15 per cent; presumably that has since fallen much further, given that this survey preceded the riots.
In many ways this is all fair enough. Many of us use video-first platforms such as Instagram and TikTok as procrastination-cum-entertainment; why shouldn’t the text-based social media sites be a place for procrastination-cum-cosy-filter-bubbling? Why not have a place on the internet that you can go and have a nice, civilised chat with someone who shares your worldview without the risk of coming across a load of vile racist content?
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It comes down, in the end, to whether or not you believe that the “digital town square” Musk talked about when he bought Twitter can really exist and, if it can, whether it is of any benefit to anyone.
I have previously argued that a “digital town square” is a contradiction in terms – the internet is never going to enable the kind of engagement and understanding that comes from coming up against a real person in all their raw and imperfect humanity.
But while it will always be much messier and more maddening than we might like, I believe such a place is preferable to a series of siloed echo chambers. The irony is that it is the man who warned of the “great danger” of a splintering-off who is most responsible for making that a reality. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024
