Bluesky and X offer different visions of the marketplace of ideas
By Jared Schroeder
The great virtual migration to Bluesky this month hasn’t been about viral videos or a disturbingly powerful algorithm. It’s been primarily about a different vision of the marketplace of ideas.
Perhaps the one common theme in Bluesky communities is that the mass virtual shift—which has included about a million new users per day since the election—has been about the nature of the space where users send and receive ideas.
Bluesky was hardly on anyone’s radar earlier this fall. The social media site, which looks a lot like early versions of Twitter, was started by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey in 2019 and became publicly available in 2021. The social media tool doesn’t have a central algorithm like X, TikTok, and YouTube. The firm instead is seeking to create a “marketplace of algorithms.”
As Bluesky CEO Jay Graber explained, “We want a future where you control what you see on social media.” The results of the firm’s efforts have been popular. Bluesky users moderate their feeds using tools that allow them to block using key words.
This decentralized power to self-moderate in more nuanced ways than are available in other social-media platforms has led users to celebrate a less toxic, more constructive environment through which to engage with others and ideas.
Such conclusions might seem counter intuitive to many, including Elon Musk, who has, in the name of freedom of expression, consistently emphasized his often-hands-off approach to content moderation on X (formerly Twitter) since he purchased the company in fall 2022.
Musk, in other words, has explicitly said he wants to create an ideal space for free expression—a place safe from the types of subjective content controls that have come from social media content moderation practices in recent years. Musk’s stated goals, in other words, seem focused on creating an idealized form of the marketplace of ideas.
“Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy,” he wrote on his X account.
His goal is laudable. The laissez faire approach, however, has created a space where hate, harassment, trolling, and false information distort and derail the marketplace of ideas.
The general argument has been tolerating terrible behaviors and expression is just a part of the marketplace-of-ideas experience, thus X has been reticent to block information, ideas, and users. Such a model is based on the social media platform acting as a sort of quasi-government entity and, in this case, often staying out of the exchange of ideas.
Bluesky presents a different vision. First, the product places moderation tools in the hands of each user, rather than creating a one-size-fits all content philosophy. Second, the app rejects the idea that we must encounter hate, falsity, harassment, and trolling to engage in the marketplace of ideas.
The Bluesky migration is noteworthy because more than 20 million people, still only about one-tenth of X’s total monthly user numbers, are choosing this different approach. They are, with the limited time and engagement social media firms are competing for, saying they want a different type of marketplace of ideas. By engaging in Bluesky, they can be understood rejecting, to some extent, X’s construction of the marketplace of ideas.
The differences really come down to diverging conclusions about the shape and nature of the space for discourse.
X’s model shapes a space that assumes users must encounter a lightly moderated exchange of ideas. This sounds like a perfect model, until we realize X’s algorithms do in fact influence the information people encounter and that the space will include substantial amounts of hate, false information, trolling, and harassment.
Bluesky’s model doesn’t have a centralized algorithm and provides tools for users to block and ban content they do not wish to encounter. This might seem like a model that gives users more power to limit freedom of expression, in the sense that they cultivate the ideas they encounter, but we can also understand it as allowing citizens to engage with ideas while limiting information that damages discourse.
Hate speech, harassment, and false information, while subjectively defined, generally contribute little to what we know or the discovery of truth. While it is problematic for the government to limit these types of expression, individuals should have the right to not engage with them.
We are not talking about government control. The First Amendment protects X and Bluesky, as well as those who use the services, from most government-originated limitations. We are instead talking about two different visions of what the virtual marketplace of ideas should look like. Both visions are free to exist because of expansive First Amendment protections.
We are therefore talking about different models of the space. In that regard, we must remember that, historically, there has never been a true, egalitarian marketplace of ideas. A variety of limitations, such as power and access, have also influenced the ideas that flow, succeed, and fail in spaces for discourse.
First Amendment theories also do not universally require that citizens encounter every possible idea. As First Amendment theorist Alexander Meiklejohn reasoned, “What is essential is not that everyone shall speak, but that everything worth saying shall be said.”
The freedom to express ideas and receive them, in other words, does not require citizens be subjected to the entire spectrum of options before concluding what is true. We are free to watch Fox News or MSNBC, or to read the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times’ opinion page.
The government choosing to ban or block content is a threat to freedom of expression, but individual decisions to do so are not. They are, instead, types of time, business, and preference decisions that we are required to make each day.
X and Bluesky also do not represent the only social media tools available. Other X alternatives, such as Threads and Mastodon, have also seen increased engagement during the past few weeks. X and Bluesky, however, are helpful because they present different visions.
What we might be seeing with the Bluesky migration is an evolution of what discourse in virtual spaces can look like. With the growth in Bluesky, users have a viable alternative to the powerful algorithmic models that have almost always dominated virtual spaces. The marketplace of ideas, in other words, is either controlled by individual users or by the corporation that owns the space.
The choice, thanks to the First Amendment, is ours.
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Jared Schroeder is an associate professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and a member of the Overby Center panel of experts. He is the author of “The Structure of Ideas: Mapping a New Theory of Freedom of Expression in the AI Era.”