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.
This ties into the age-old debate about platforming bigotry in the name of free speech. Bigots don’t care that much about talking with like-minded people — they want to subject others to their beliefs and to feel as though they are a righteous majority. Without their hapless victims they become like a bully standing alone in the schoolyard, impotently yearning for somebody to punch down on.
Very good callout. It’s the same reason why they’re bigots - they have to feel bigger than someone. They always have to feel superior in every way. There’s a reason that immigrants and “the other” are always demonized and belittled by them, and it’s because they have to feel bigger than them. If they didn’t well, let’s look at where the majority of them actually fall on the societal ladder. The bottom. The vast majority of them are on the bottom rung of the societal ladder. Not having the others to make fun of/belittle/feel superior to would cause them to actually realize where they are and how much they’ve been screwed in life, and I think that actually terrifies them.
Liberals just actualized and realized where most people are in society. I think the vast majority of conservatives are just manifesting pure denial.
…but that’s not true. The evidence bore out that Trump voters were largely white middle class. The kind of people who would have a big stupid truck, a boat, a generator, and any other number of things that take fuel, which is why they care so stupid fuck much about the price of gas. (Not enough to do anything like use less gas of course, because that’s not FREEDOM)
They were white uneducated middle class, but middle class nonetheless. Middle managers and “small business” owners.
They already do have power over other people, and they like it that way. What they’re fighting against is anyone who wants to take away from their fake meritocracy where they can continue to control and abuse the lives of the people who are under their thumbs in the workplace. It’s why they hate the poor. It’s why they hate academia and intellectuals. It’s why they hate democracy, because they’re allowed to be a petty dictator in the feifdom of whatever shithole business they work at/own.
The biggest reason Office Space is a fantasy is because the Bobs do their job and remove the actual waste in the company. That almost never happens in real life. In real life Lumberg and all the other bosses would be safe and every low level employee would get the shaft. Trump voters are Lumberg and the other middle managers who take great joy in micromanaging. It’s half the reason they want people back in the office, too (the other half the reason being a stealth layoff). They don’t actually care about efficiency, it’s about control.
Let’s stop pretending that all Trump voters are uneducated yokels. They’re uneducated and they’re yokels, but they’re more than that. They’re every shitty fucking boss you’ve ever had, which is why Elon Musk walks amongst them. We don’t need to make excuses for these people who are sorry excuses anyway.
This is the part that needs to get repeated over, and over again. What we’re fighting against is a group that wants to maintain the status quo because it advantages them. Nothing more, nothing less. If we want to win, we need them to see that cooperation is in their greater interest. Unfortunately, the left-most available political parties have failed to show them that time and time again, so they’re turning the other direction.
Had us in the first half, not gonna lie…
There’s a reason Proud Boys and southern Oregon neo nazis show up to large Portland OR protests. The rationale is no different than what The Atlantic discusses here, even the context is the same, only shifted away from the keyboard.