We live in an age of media upheaval, where the mainstream forms of information have sunk into all-new lows of irrelevance, where parody sites like The Babylon Bee and The Onion may truly start to struggle since their headlines increasingly resemble “reality.” The upheaval has hit the social media front too. After Donald Trump was elected to be the 47th president of the United States, scores of X users hit the road, citing Bluesky as the alternative discourse destination.

Many of the people leading the exodus to Bluesky, a social media site that was created by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, are left-wing voices who feel that the Musk-owned X has become too inundated with hate speech and toxic views. Bluesky has been hailed as a nicer version of X, cited as a safe haven for those who may feel threatened by Elon Musk’s new conservative bent and overt support for Trump.

However, is Bluesky any better than X? A shocking new article from The Free Press by Jesse Singal suggests that the “left-wing Twitter” is just as noxious and bitter as the worst of X. Anyone who has spent a number of time on X knows that it includes a fair number of trolls and negative commentary, with its colorful nut jobs and conspiracy theorists. However, Singal calls foul on the notion that Bluesky is any better. In fact, it might be worse. Singal got on Bluesky recently and found a cauldron of vitriol lying in wait for him. He reports,

When I arrived, I was was bombarded with messages from people telling me to kill myself, or expressing their opinion that I should be killed. When a Change.org petition signed by 25,000 people failed to get me booted off the platform — likely due to my having never come close to violating any rule — the anger only spread further.

Instead of a warm welcome, Singal was met with death threats. He also reports that Bluesky’s protocol for dealing with violent threats appears to be weaker than X’s, which is the opposite of what many might suspect. When Singal brought his concerns to Bluesky, he got no response.

Social Media’s Deeper Problem

Singal wisely concludes the essay by saying that we don’t have a right-wing or a left-wing problem but a human problem, that when we divvy ourselves up into tribes and resort to throwing out the heretics, we become exactly like the people we’re decrying.

This is social media’s deeper problem, regardless if it’s X or Bluesky: It sucks us into echo chambers, discourages genuine conversation across ideological divides, and hooks us on outrage. Unless we can combat that, we can flee to the outskirts of the digital jungle all we want but never heal our fractured social bonds.