Just two days ago Ethics Alarms featured a somewhat sarcastic post “thanking” BlueSky for “provid[ing] a wonderful way for the intolerant, doctrinaire, anti-speech progressives who have divided the country and the culture while endangering civic discourse and democracy to show exactly who and what they are.”
But seriously folks, the new Twitter/X competitor, like so many things embraced by the Angry Totalitarian Left in recent years, is another shot to the solar plexus of a functioning democracy.
Kevin Roose , the technology columnist for The New York Times and a co-host of the Times tech podcast, “Hard Fork” illustrates why the platform is so sinister while praising it in a Times column. “You may be wondering why Bluesky — an experimental social media app that was started in 2019 under Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s former chief executive, before becoming an independent company in 2021 — is attracting so much attention these days,” he writes.
No I don’t wonder at all: it’s clear as a bell on my nose. My Trump Deranged Facebook Friends have made the reasons they are fleeing to BlueSky explicit. They don’t want to be exposed to any opinions, news or events that challenge their biases and partisan assumptions. They regard anyone who doesn’t bow down to progressive cant, even as it is proving intellectually and practically bankrupt by the minute, as stupid, immoral and a blight on existence. BlueSky is the web equivalent of joining a cult or a commune.
Roose describes the platform’s appeal as nostalgia for “the Old Twitter,” meaning the heavy-handed Left-biased platform that had different standards for conservatives and progressives and who banned a President of the United States after working hard to ensure his defeat by censoring a genuine news story that reflected poorly on his opponent, Joe Biden. He describes the current Twitter/”X” as Elon Musk’s “tedious quest to turn X into a right-wing echo chamber where he and his friends are the permanent, inescapable main characters.” Yet the Musk “X” bans virtually nobody, making the site a genuine democratic community bulletin board for information, news, opinions, and, yes, silly memes and garbage. It’s not an echo chamber, but BlueSky is designed to be an echo chamber with only progressive echoes.
That’s bad for democracy, which thrives on the exchange of ideas, not citizens isolating themselves from arguments and dissent because, as I continue to find in most of the posts from the bitter losers after the Nov. 5 election, all they have is unalterable beliefs that their rhetorical skills and accumulated evidence are sadly inadequate to support. “My mind’s made up, don’t confuse me with facts” is the philosophy of these doctrinaire, fearful, civically illiterate people.
The Founders loved to argue and they did it passionately and well. Retreating to the warm cocoon of BlueSky would have appalled them, as it should appall us all.
CNN in one of its rare outbreaks of journalism, pointed out recently that since Musk took over “X,” the mix of users has changed dramatically from approximately 2 to 1 progressives over conservatives to almost exactly 50-50…you know, just like the country.
The Left apparently doesn’t like those odds. Typical.
Ethics Alarms 
“They don’t want to be exposed to any opinions, news or events that challenge their biases and partisan assumptions. They regard anyone who doesn’t bow down to progressive cant, even as it is proving intellectually and practically bankrupt by the minute, as stupid, immoral and a blight on existence.”
Then why the hell am I still here?
Oh, now you’re fishing for compliments…
Suggested answers:
1. Because you know what you’re talking about and don’t offer unsupported or unsupportable opinions
2. Because you’re not a weenie
3. Because you don’t take dissent and disagreements personally
4. Because you’re capable of changing your position
5. Because you’re not afraid of being made to look like a fool because you aren’t one and can hold your own with anyone
6. Because what fun would it be to hang out with only people you agree with?
I got my first block on BlueSky this afternoon for my reply to this post…
When I try to fin the post I now get this…
I get a Posts Hidden when I go to the author’s profile.
Here is my BlueSky page.
I’m going to continue to test what’s going on there by posting more things once in a while and randomly reply to comments from others.
Confirmed, Oliver Markus Malloy blocked me.
I’m so distraught, only two days on BlueSky and someone has already blocked me. How can I go on?
I just did a real quick internet search to find out how far out in left field this Los Angeles based Oliver Markus Malloy’s is and as I figured, he’s way out there.
Here’s a small example…
Ah! The “bloodbath” lie. So he’s an idiot, then.
“What is wrong with these people?”
I should probably point out that a 40-ish German guy has not, in fact, “seen this before”.
His sign could be taken in an entirely different way. Maybe he was East German, and saw the change from a repressive and violent bunch of socialists running things.
“Hard Fork”? Nice. Classy.
I’m on a BlueSky blocked roll.
I was just blocked by a person calling themself Suelli after a brief conversation. The parroting the lie of the left that Trump called white supremists “fine people” was enough signature significance for me to let loose the hounds.
That was my final reply to Suelli before getting blocked. It’s reasonably fair to say that my asking about the phrase “bias makes you stupid” was probably what put Suelli over the edge.
Good. I share your pride.
The lefties in search of a save zone, ideological bubble to cry in isn’t working. Read the replies to George Conway’s moronic fear mongering Magic 8 Ball post.
I posted a reply that’s somewhere buried in those thousands of replies, mine was…
Conway doesn’t appear to be smart enough to know that his gaslighting places a spotlight on the evidence showing that the current White House is an “epicenter of corruption”, so his statement is pure projection.
My BlueSky Experience Update
So far my experience on BlueSky is as follows:
The things I post on my own profile are left alone. With very few exceptions, whenever I post a comment directly challenging something a progressive has written I usually get blocked in very short order.
I have noticed that BlueSky really isn’t the ideological social media bubble that it was advertised to be and that’s because there are a lot of non progressives that chose to join the platform and pierce that ideological bubble. It seems to me that BlueSky is not kicking off the non-progressive posters for their non-progressive free speech. So, since progressives aren’t getting the ideological bubble they wanted out of BlueSky, I think they’ll likely migrate back to Twitter aka X and just block more people on that platform. In the end I think they’ll likely either stop using that kind of social media or drastically reduce how much time they spend on line and search for another ideological bubble to crawl in.
I think the BlueSky is an anti-Twitter, anti-Musk, anti-free speech, progressive bubble was nothing but social media hype and an intentional ploy to suck progressives into joining and naturally non-progressives followed suit. Someone probably made a LOT of money by creating this false facade progressive ideological bubble. Progressives should boycott the platform for its bait & switch.
I think Michael Ejercito has spent more time on BlueSky than I have, his experience might be a bit different.
This intelligence is very useful and helpful Steve. As you no doubt saw, a recent survey found that Musk’s retooled twitter has better ideological balance than any of the other social media platforms, virtually 50-50. Fleeing to BlueSky, even based on a misimpressions, is signature significance.