Why we need an insufferable liberal elite

The Great Migration to Bluesky

The Pilgrim Fathers left England because they couldn’t bear to be ruled by the ungodly. They didn’t establish a life in New England to instigate a reign of tolerance - they just wanted to be the ones bullying other people for having the wrong opinions. This is true of many political refugees around the world; it’s not that they object in principle to the losing side being fleeced or tortured, they just object to it being them. 

So inclusive were the religious separatists who founded Plymouth and Massachusetts colonies that when citizens of this new City on a Hill expressed unpopular opinions, they forced them to leave – Rhode Island came into being after Roger Williams was excluded for his dissenting views. (So much for the tolerant Left, etc.)

Today there is another great migration of the godly in progression, and as the New York Times reports, users of social media site Bluesky doubled in just one week this month. The platform had been growing steadily but the recent US election was a spur for this new Great Migration to accelerate, with many Twitter veterans making some rather dramatic departure announcements. I’ve also joined Bluesky, and a lot it is exactly as you’d imagine, but there are also some huge advantages.

Many users claim that it’s kinder and more civilised, although up to a point. I am a qualified supporter of nostalgia myths, but the tendency to see the past as better has become more left-coded since Brexit, and the rise of a particular lamentation about Britain before the populists (often centred on the 2012 London Olympics). In part I wonder if this is just the first truly liberal cohort (mine) reaching an age where they start to reminisce about the past, but in so many ways things have indeed got worse in Britain. The same is true of Twitter, which people constantly complained was in decline, but was never exactly Eden.

Remember when the site was used by a model to tell a 16-year-old to kill themselves? Or when a reality TV star was driven to suicide by online bullying?  Or how an unknown woman became the most hated person on earth because of one silly tweet?

The unpleasantness on ‘X’ - a terrible rebrand - is now often coarser and more right-wing, but in many ways not as sadistic as before; it’s less like the calculated cruelty of an elite girls’ school and more like the abuse shouted from a football terrace circa 1985.

It has a different vibe now, and the people moving to Bluesky are like the Pilgrims heading to New England; I’m not sure they want ‘tolerance’, but rather a community where people share their values, and can easily find others to take their side – something I totally understand. But I don’t imagine the problem of abuse will go away, anymore than people escaping the sin of Old England could escape human wickedness in the New World.

Victoria Smith, who as a gender-critical feminist probably appreciates how kind old Twitter was, recently wrote that:

To anyone who views a decade ago as “back when Twitter was nice” — a time before Elon Musk got his hands on it, or even before “the gender wars” became “so polarised” — I’d say you probably weren’t an online feminist. Or maybe you were, and you were better than me at not allowing this stuff to drive you insane. Back then, I was very determined to be on the side of the righteous and pure, and god, it was a nightmare. 

‘I’d witness “privileged feminists with platforms” — those who had a column, or a book, or a TV series — be subjected to regular pile-ons, thanks to the worst possible interpretation of some random tweet. Anyone who sought to defend them would be in the firing line, therefore I didn’t. Indeed, I sometimes added my own pious declaration of disapproval instead. You didn’t have to believe these women had done anything wrong — you could simply start a Twitter thread filled with platitudes about how we’re all unaware of our own privilege, before rounding it up with a tenuous “and that’s why Lena Dunham / Mary Beard / the girls behind Vagenda should try to do better, too!”. I could say the memory shames me now, but it shamed me back then, too. It’s not as though I wasn’t really aware of what I was doing.

The experience on Bluesky, she says, reminds her of Twitter before Elon Musk, and gender-critical feminists, naturally, are still getting lots of unpleasantness. But anyone who expressed non-progressive views on old Twitter will have their own story to tell: one of the bizarre things about the moral panic which followed the European Championship final in 2021 was the report that Marcus Rashford received 500 abusive messages on Twitter, which as many journalists will tell you, is hardly unusual. Racist abuse may be quantitatively worse, at least to the social fabric, but under the old system of ‘moderation’ even veiled or unveiled threats of violence would be treated with absurd leniency. The site was characterised by anarcho-tyranny, where one might be banned for stating biological facts but not for overtly fantasising about physically harming someone; rule-enforcement could not be agreed on, because people didn’t trust the authorities to act in a fair and impartial manner towards the tribe excluded from power.

Then Elon Musk took over, and what was a Left-wing-dominated site became increasingly Right-wing. Musk has been very useful for conservatives, at least so far: since the western ruling class were increasingly heading in an extreme direction, the abandonment of overt censorship resulted in the reverse of the preference falsification cascade. But it has come at a cost, and as with many things, the nostalgic folks aren’t entirely wrong – things are getting worse, and this presents the tribe in control with some serious problems.

Many worry about the risk of echo chambers making polarisation worse, something Oliver Johnson argued here, although I’m not sure it’s necessarily bad if people just ignore each other. As James Marriott wrote, echo chambers can be benign, and ‘there is compelling research to show that the radicalising political effects of the internet derive less from our insulation from the views of others than over-exposure. Online rage results not from liberals and conservatives complacently agreeing with one another but from people seeing too much of their maddest political opponents… Neither side has been made much calmer by the experience. Connection is not an unlimited good.’