Musk's New World
How the Left abandoned the field
Although much derided as ‘non-predictive’, in the run-up to the US Presidential Election, Donald Trump was consistently the clear favourite on the betting markets. He led by about 60-40 on Polymarket immediately prior to election day — in part driven by a few whales, including a Frenchman who put $70 million on Trump to win on the basis of ‘who would your neighbour vote for?’ phone polling.
The biggest whale of them all, however, was not to be found on Polymarket. Elon Musk’s two-year wager on a Trump victory was placed with a $44 billion leveraged buyout of Twitter, now known as X, that put him in the crosshairs of the Left as he sought to establish the first major social media network where speech was genuinely free. Had he lost this bet, he would now be at the mercy of a Harris administration whose noisiest supporters were calling for the legal persecution of the billionaire. This was no idle threat: there is little reason to believe the Democrats would not have subjected Musk to the same treatment that Trump has undergone at the hands of New York’s capricious Attorney General.
Musk’s reign at X/Twitter, henceforth ‘New Twitter’, has profoundly changed the website. Even beyond changing the website’s name, and purely looking from a product perspective, Musk has deliberately destroyed many of the most useful features of Old Twitter. He has removed Twitter Circles, which means that one cannot both maintain a large public account and send certain content to only a subset of your followers; instead, you are forced to have all of your posts laid bare to the masses, or to lock your account entirely, with no halfway house possible.
‘Likes’ first went from being open for all to see; then to being optionally private; and then to being private for everyone except the poster. Presumably, this change was made in order to protect those who want to ‘like’ politically-incorrect content or pornography. The former aim is understandable from an ‘anti-Woke’ point of view: this meant that those with widely-followed accounts could not be attacked by deranged obsessives who spend their time scouring other people’s ‘likes’ tab for right-wing posts. And indeed, anecdotally, it does seem that since this change was introduced, those non-anonymous accounts who have sympathies with the Dissident Right have been much more generous with their ‘likes’.
Unfortunately, this also means that a regular user now has nothing to click on to inspect further whenever reading a thread, or seeing a post on his timeline that he enjoys. Seeing who ‘liked’ a particular post or a rebuttal to it opened up new avenues for finding more content, and more timelines to follow, thus helping keep you on the website. This is now completely dead. This has been further exacerbated by another big change: paid bluechecks, and the huge reply boost they enjoy. Comments sections under posts used to prioritise the most popular replies. But with bluechecks now prioritised much more than before (in order to incentivise paying), the comment section is now mostly useless as a place for real discussion, as one must scroll past the army of OnlyFans whores and other assorted grifters who comment under every single popular post before you can find any organic responses. Again, this has made the place feel much emptier than before.
What has replaced the Old Twitter user experience is a flat wall of algorithmically-driven content via New Twitter’s ‘For You’ tab. The old algorithm was hardly perfect, and was certainly biased against the Right, but the new algorithm is somehow even worse, seeming to boost excessively Musk’s own posts, far-right (and especially anti-Semitic) content, and low-attention-span video spam from Turkish women and accounts with names like ‘Internet Hall of Fame’. The new algorithm does not seem to be at all sensitive to people’s interests: women who mostly use the site to follow the tennis or Formula 1 are now barraged with videos of Andrew Tate. Moreover, it has now become seemingly impossible to avoid the annoying algorithm with the ‘Following’ tab, which no longer seems to be just a rolling feed of those you follow, with few or zero algorithmic adjustments — as it claims to be. Now, even the ‘Following’ tab still seems intent to bury certain accounts and, in particular, any and all external links. For instance, Steve Sailer’s account seems to have been heavily suppressed on both timelines since he moved his blog to Substack and began posting links to this site.
The increasingly extreme suppression of external links has made New Twitter a much less useful method of driving traffic, lowering the incentives for media outlets to post. As a result, the cost of left-wing organisations leaving the website has been dramatically reduced, and it is perhaps this that has led to The Guardian — among others — finally taking the plunge.
The new algorithm will probably have a radicalising effect on normal people browsing the site for basically apolitical content, who are now met with a flood of videos from far-right accounts of immigrants committing crime. But Old Twitter was never wholly about our own audience: in part, it was also about our antagonists on the Left, and the fun of confronting them. As such, this change cannot be considered an unalloyed good.
The most powerful way to convince a smart person to move to the Right was to have them watch a Rightist argue with a well-credentialled Leftist, and make the Leftist look hysterical or censorious. People do not really change their minds because of well-evidenced arguments made in a vacuum: they change their minds because they see one of the two sides of a debate be made to look stupid or uncool. New Twitter increasingly does not provide the opportunity to do this. Even before the growing exodus to Bluesky, the Left had gone awfully quiet on New Twitter, treating posting there as a chore to be fulfilled, rather than an activity they enjoyed. You can see this in the tone of their posts on Bluesky as compared to New Twitter on Bluesky, in the knowledge that a raging mob is not permanently lying in wait to quote tweet or reply with abuse, they are far more open and earnest. To see this, compare the posts of the FT’s Stephen Bush on each website; or read the return of Marie Le Conte’s verbally incontinent rambling, which she had toned down prior to her departure from New Twitter.
The political class is addicted to New Twitter because it is where news happens. People break a story there, then secondary reactions drive the coverage to be copied and posted into mainstream media. During the US Presidential Election, friend of Pimlico Journal captivedreamer7 was able to use the website to successfully drive the issue of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio to such prominence that it featured in a presidential debate. Thanks to the posting of Pimlico Journal contributor JUICE on social housing statistics in London, it has become increasingly widely accepted that immigrants are disproportionately reliant on public services; indeed, sitting MPs have read out the statistics he has compiled in Parliament. In the latter case, a key part of the rise of this narrative to such prominence has been the failed attempts of the Left to debunk these statistics. In particular, noted immigration fanatic Jonathan Portes’ activities have led to their continual restatement and validation by virtue of how deeply the entire Right hates his noxious personality. Having an antagonist fixes the debate on an issue and polarises onlookers based on who they dislike more — and the answer, increasingly, is that they dislike the Left.
Previous attempts to break X/Twitter’s monopoly over this critical section of the media ecosystem have fallen flat: thanks to their anaemic userbases, Gab, Parler, Mastodon, Threads, etc., all simply failed to reach the required critical mass of people talking about the news. In the cases of more-or-less explicitly right-wing Gab and Parler, this was probably because the Right does not actually want to wallow in their own swamp, despite the censorship on Old Twitter: they want to bring the fight to the establishment. In the cases of Mastodon and Threads, which claim to be politically neutral but are clearly more targeted at a Left dissatisfied with non-censorship on New Twitter, there was not yet a sufficient narrative of right-wing dominance to convince mainstream journalists to give up their follower counts — something that took years to accumulate — and up sticks.
The current exodus to Bluesky, however, feels somewhat different. With Trump’s crushing victory, Musk’s website now feels like a place the resurgent Right controls; not only because of the new algorithm, but because of Musk’s prominent role in the incoming administration. The Left do not want to fight on even ground, and they certainly do not want to fight anywhere they feel there is a thumb on the scale against them, so they are leaving.
The online Right is, after around a decade of relentlessly hostile moderation, made up of those most resilient to ban waves; those most willing to return and fight again; those memorable enough that their followers would make the effort to find their respawned accounts. By contrast, the Left have never been banned from social media in this way. Untouched by the moderators, they rambled bovine rubbish to adulation from provincial boomers with ‘FBPE’ in their bio, while their critics were cut down at the first question of whether someone was really a woman. This is what they are returning to do on Bluesky because it makes them feel happy and important.
Prior to the Musk Era, you could be banned for saying that NHS nurses should speak English, or for describing a ‘neovagina’, or even for saying that someone was overweight — indeed, I have personally been banned for all three. It was, in hindsight, a staggeringly intensive system of content moderation, but perhaps not one that was wholly unnecessary if you wanted to get the censorious and overemotional modern Leftist to post on your website. After all, UNZ Review’s table of internet usage by website always reveals a horde of right-wingers that can only post on certain sites and do so at a much greater velocity than your average internet user. It takes a lot of banning to stop the Right rising to prominence, even dominance, on social media.
Trump’s victory has led to floods of people declaring that they are opening Bluesky accounts. It is important to note that this has little to do with their personal user experience on New Twitter as nothing in particular changed when Trump won Pennsylvania: it is instead mostly a hissy-fit at the fact that they are losing, and, worse still, are posting on a platform owned by the people to which they are losing. But we should acknowledge that the membership of Bluesky had been creeping up even prior to the election, having surged from 9 million people in September to 14.5 million in the week to 12 November. Only 1 million of these arrived after Kamala Harris’ defeat.
Bluesky will probably not defeat New Twitter in the battle for control of the political elite’s main online public forum. Musk benefits from enormous incumbency bias, thanks to the inherent network effects at play, and other communities cohabit the site with the politics addicts. For example, absolutely nobody expects ‘Black Twitter’ or ‘Football Twitter’ to ever leave the website, and both are widely accepted as amusing sources of content outside of the Dissident Right. ‘HazLCFC’ is not joining Bluesky, and neither are his 100,000 followers. As such, Bluesky will remain a place where all you can do is read about left-wing politics, with a few pictures of animals thrown in.
Nevertheless, the offshoring of the left-wing mainstream onto Bluesky will give them a forum on which they can discuss politics in relative privacy, in comments sections uncorrupted by the negative product changes seen on New Twitter. This is somewhat enviable. After all, the online Right was built on forums that looked very similar to this in structure, with long threads of like-minded people trading ideas back and forth. Fortunately, the Left did not leave New Twitter to do this: they left because they are dull, incurious bigots who hate everyone who disagrees with them. 42.53% of Bluesky users have already blocked someone on a website that nearly exclusively hosts their closest allies. One of the most blocked users on Bluesky is Will Stancil, for the crime of telling them why they lost, despite his deep and earnest desire for them to win.
What we have lost are the days when we, the anons, could run over to the Left in their ball pit and make them look stupid before getting banned. What we have gained is a fair fight. The Left have run from this fair fight, leaving us with unfettered access to millions upon millions of ordinary people. It seems narcissistic for the Left, in a strop, to completely abandon what remains of their control over the newsfeed of the world, at least from the perspective of those — like us — who stayed to fight for many years when the boot was firmly on the other foot. But it is what they are doing nonetheless. I hope they enjoy their new ghetto.
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