Kat Tenbarge, tech and culture reporter for NBC News, filed an online story Saturday, “Journalists flock to Bluesky as X becomes increasingly ‘toxic’ — Journalists are finding more readers and less hate on Bluesky than on the platform they used to know as Twitter.”
As long as you follow the liberal line, that is.
Tenbarge opened with a journalist and Bluesky fan:
When Ashton Pittman, an award-winning news editor and reporter, first joined the app Bluesky, he said, he was the only Mississippi journalist he knew to be using it. Until about five weeks ago, he said, that was the case. But now, Pittman said, there are at least 15 Mississippi journalists on Bluesky as it becomes a preferred platform for reporters, writers, activists and other groups who have become increasingly alienated by X.
(Pittman sees fascists everywhere he looks these days, including on Twitter, “a chamber that’s increasingly filled with the echoes of Adolf Hitler.”)
The same outlets who refused to see the clear evidence before their eyes of conservatives being throttled on Jack Dorsey-led Twitter are muttering about supposed suppression by Musk.
Since Elon Musk bought Twitter, has turned the platform into an increasingly difficult place for journalists, and many had come to suspect that the platform had begun to suppress the reach of posts that include links to external websites. On Sunday, Musk confirmed the platform has deprioritized posts including links, which was how journalists and other creators historically shared their work. But four journalists told NBC News that after millions of users migrated to Bluesky, an alternative that resembles a pared-back version of X, after the election, they are rebuilding their audiences there, too.
Surprise! Liberal media outlets are finding life more congenial in the BlueSky echo chamber, where there’s little conservative pushback or disagreement.
Platform and audience editors at The Guardian and The Boston Globe have publicly noted higher traffic to their news websites from Bluesky than from competitors including Threads, Meta’s X alternative….
Bluesky, initially built as part of an initiative funded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who cut ties with the company in May, launched to the public as an invitation-only platform last year. Some of its earliest users included Black, trans and politically progressive people. Journalists who belong to and cover issues affecting marginalized populations have found Bluesky to be a much more welcoming environment.
“I think that Bluesky’s demographic is literally just anybody who can’t stand the sort of toxic environment that Twitter has become, and that spans a large range of people,” said Erin Reed, an independent journalist covering trans rights issues on Substack. “Journalists don’t like toxicity and toxic comments. We want to have conversations with people, and we don’t want everything to devolve into slurs being hurled back and forth.”
Actually, journalists are often eager to stir up left-wing toxicity against conservatives — it’s basically MSNBC’s strategy. Reed compares “anti-trans” GOP legislation to “genocide.”
Oppose the trans agenda? You believe in mass murder. But that’s not a “slur” or a “toxic comment”?
Numerous studies and analyses have found that after Musk took over the platform, use of hate speech increased. Over time, the platform became a bastion of the right-wing internet.
Wrong. According to CNN, Twitter is actually becoming politically balanced, now that Musk has taken over and conservatives have stopped being shadow-banned or actually banned from the platform, while liberals annoyed with losing their privileges abscond to the Bluesky echo chamber.
Reed also said traffic to her Substack articles has doubled since she began posting exclusively on Bluesky. She and Talia Lavin, a journalist and author who covers the far right, said X had become overrun with anti-trans speech, as well as other forms of bigotry and harassment. Lavin said she noticed an uptick of antisemitism and pro-Nazi accounts on X, as did Pittman.
Twitter is infested with pro-Hamas anti-Jew rhetoric from the left, but that has never been a media concern.
At least NBC didn’t talk to left-wing Lavin about online misinformation, given that Lavin herself had to resign from the New Yorker magazine in 2018 after mistaking a Marine’s tattoo for a Nazi symbol.