The liberal exodus from X to Bluesky created a kind of real-world social-science experiment. It was as if progressives on one side and conservatives and centrists on the other sorted themselves into two separate laboratory dishes. (I don’t want to make toomuch of this; there are still plenty of liberals on X, and both platforms have lots of people mostly interested in nonpolitical topics. But stay with me.) With the most passionate progressives in one petri dish, and with conservatives and MAGA types now unleashed in the other, scientists could get out their notebooks and watch what kind of cultures emerged.
I’ve been on Twitter/X since its earliest days, and I still find it a useful way to keep tabs on the many topics I follow. In the Musk era, my feed on X has become noticeably more chaotic, with a higher proportion of random accounts shouting angrily into the void. Sometimes those voices come from the MAGA right (usually saying something about “treason” or “RINOS”). But there is plenty of anger from the left as well. For example, any post supportive of Israel is immediately attacked by nasty pro-Hamas accounts. I don’t love X’s somewhat uglier vibe, but I accept the trade-off. I’m willing to tolerate a few angry or idiotic posts in exchange for knowing that right-wing views aren’t being deliberately buried.
Despite the controversy, X has hardly become a conservative echo chamber. A late 2024 Pew Research Center poll found that news consumers on X are almost precisely balanced between Democrats and Republicans; two years earlier, Democrats outnumbered Republicans on the site more than two to one. I suspect that the progressives who feel threatened by right-wing “hate” have simply never experienced a cultural environment where conservatives speak as loudly as liberals. And, against all odds, Musk’s business strategy seems to be working. Though X’s total number of users has dropped, the site’s financial health is improving. Analysts estimate that the company’s total value is approaching the $44 billion Musk paid for it in 2022, a valuation most experts (including Musk himself) considered wildly inflated at the time.
