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Following the 2024 election, many users have left Elon Musk’s X and the main beneficiary has been the Bluesky social network. For the first time, Bluesky reported that it had surpassed 20 million users.
On paper, this would seem to be a great development for the right wingers on X. The liberals they detest are moving out of the digital neighborhood and their leader has the ear of the incoming president, Donald Trump. All is well, one would think.
Instead, conservatives are whining about the exodus and some, like Joel Berry of the (not very funny) conservative satire site Babylon Bee, are fuming that their attempts to join Bluesky are being met with opposition. Why is this happening?
Over the last decade-plus, conservatism has adopted a culture best described as “owning the libs.” The overriding drive behind this is to publicly demonstrate some sort of dominance over liberals as a way (they think) of exhibiting the superiority of conservatism. One would think that if conservative ideas are so great that they could merely win any argument—cutting taxes for the wealthy, deregulating big business, supporting discrimination, what’s not to like?
For the right, it’s a lot easier to try and point and laugh, eternally arguing that conservative ideas and memes are so good, so powerful, so correct that liberals are constantly “triggered” and having “meltdowns.” The way conservatives seek to demonstrate this is through cruelty, and as writer Adam Serwer brilliantly articulated at The Atlantic, “the cruelty is the point.”
In right-wing media like Fox News, a staple of content is extended recapping of purportedly liberal programming like “The View” to document liberal anger at conservatism.
Trump is the perfect avatar of this way of looking at the world. While he could not make a cogent argument on policy to save his life, Trump is quite good at hurling a barrage of insults or ignorance that upsets people who truly care about things.
This was why Trump had such a good time on Twitter before he was banned for inciting the insurrection on Jan. 6, and it is the kind of behavior Musk has fostered since he took over the company and removed Trump’s ban.
Conservatives on the social network, taking their lead from Musk and his troll army of devoted followers, live to “own the libs.”
Bluesky has said they value community over harassment and have put in tools and functions that—while flawed—are more in line with the tools available on Twitter before Musk took over. So if the “libs” move somewhere else, like Bluesky, there aren’t any liberals to own.
Without liberals to dogpile on and demonstrate their dominance, conservatives have to tolerate their own company. This is the problem that has faced other conservative social media networks in the past, including Parler and Trump’s own Truth Social. Parler was more useful as a tool to organize terroristic attacks than as a traditional social media network for this reason.
It turns out that these people need the liberals they hate so much to give meaning to their (apparently) sad online lives.
The shift to Bluesky could be a temporary blip or a long-term trend, but right now people are using one of the most valuable weapons one can wield online—attention—and turning it away from Musk’s pro-Trump horror show. Many people have decided that no matter the global reach and breadth of X, it just might not be worth it to empower a bigot like Musk.
Not having the libs to own, after making the behavior such a big part of their lives, has created a vacuum for the right. In that way, the libs have now owned them.
Republished with permission from Daily Kos.
