The X exodus is weakening a way for conservatives to speak to the masses.

Archive.org link

Some key excerpts:

Since Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and subsequently turned it into X, disaffected users have talked about leaving once and for all

For the most part, X has held up as the closest thing to a central platform for political and cultural discourse.

After Trump’s election victory, more people appear to have gotten serious about leaving. According to Similarweb, a social-media analytics company, the week after the election corresponded with the biggest spike in account deactivations on X since Musk’s takeover of the site. Many of these users have fled to Bluesky: The Twitter-like microblogging platform has added about 10 million new accounts since October.

In a sense, this is a victory for conservatives: As the left flees and X loses broader relevance, it becomes a more overtly right-wing site. But the right needs liberals on X.

As each wave departs X, the site gradually becomes less valuable to those who stay, prompting a cycle that slowly but surely diminishes X’s relevance.

Of course, if X becomes more explicitly right wing, it will be a far bigger conservative echo chamber than either Gab or Truth Social.

Still, the right successfully completing a Gab-ification of X doesn’t mean that moderates and everyone to the left of them would have to live on a platform dominated by the right and mainline conservative perspectives. It would just mean that even more people with moderate and liberal sympathies will get disgusted and leave the platform, and that the right will lose the ability to shape wider discourse.

The conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who has successfully seeded moral panics around critical race theory and DEI hiring practices, has directly pointed to X as a tool that has let him reach a general audience.

This utility becomes diminished when most of the people looking at X are just other right-wingers who already agree with them. The fringier, vanguard segments of the online right seem to understand this and are trying to follow the libs to Bluesky.

Liberals and the left do not need the right to be online in the way that the right needs liberals and the left. The nature of reactionary politics demands constant confrontations—literal reactions—to the left. People like Rufo would have a substantially harder time trying to influence opinions on a platform without liberals. “Triggering the libs” sounds like a joke, but it is often essential for segments of the right. This explains the popularity of some X accounts with millions of followers, such as Libs of TikTok, whose purpose is to troll liberals.

The more liberals leave X, the less value it offers to the right, both in terms of cultural relevance and in opportunities for trolling.

  • Snot FlickermanEnglish
    64•1 month ago

    The right has an abuse problem. They don’t want to understand consent.

    They see power as a means to an end. Is it a surprise they support rape when rape is about power?

    Abusers never see themselves at fault and some will follow their abused victims to the ends of the earth to be able to pile on more abuse that they see as deserved. They aren’t going to stop and self-reflect on this behavior. They will either become bored or they will double down and do whatever they can to continue harassing and abusing those who are different than themselves.

    They will DARVO us until the very end. This is how it has always been with those who dole out abuse.

    • @zephorah@lemm.ee
      18•1 month ago

      I really do worry about Trumps 1A speech. He may very well go after Blue Sky in a the ways he promised, under the premise of 1A. Now these same bullies have the President in their corner, possibly wielding the DOJ on it.

      • Snot FlickermanEnglish
        32•1 month ago

        He may very well go after Blue Sky in a the ways he promised, under the premise of 1A.

        Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

        ― Jean-Paul Sartre

        They know they’re abusing the idea of free speech to control others’ speech and they don’t really care how we feel about it.