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Social Media Is Navigating Its Sectarian Phase
Many liberals who had fled X for Bluesky seem to be embracing the Elon Musk-owned platform once more. Why?
(On the platform, X is euphemistically referred to as “the other place.”) It’s impossible to generalize about the entire population of the site—many of Bluesky’s users do not post in English and do not engage with American politics—yet it has developed an identity as a haven for liberals in the aftermath of Elon Musk ’s acquisition of Twitter and Donald Trump ’s reëlection as President. Bluesky, part of the decentralized internet, is slower paced and caters to niche interests, rewarding internecine fights over minutiae, whereas X is deliberately chaotic, encouraging the gathering of follower-armies and ideological insult-comedy for an audience that may be largely made up of bots. TheFree Press gained notoriety through Twitter-style right-wing disaffection and railed against perceived liberal orthodoxies; Weiss’s journalistic instincts might be best summed up by a recent piece investigating whether Gazan children who had starved to death under Israeli blockades had preëxisting illnesses.
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