Breaking up with antisocial media

Guest contributor Evan Sutton: everyone pays for accepting antisocial behavior. Here's why the migration to Bluesky might finally change things.

As millions of users flooded from Twitter to Bluesky last week, the right-wing commentariat was in a huff about those soft libs hiding in safe spaces and echo chambers (a laughable accusation from people who insist on being spoon-fed comforting lies by Fox News). 

Responding to the whining, comedian Andy Richter skeeted, “Fuck all this echo chamber horseshit. I don’t come here to have my worldview challenged, I come here to have some fucking fun.”

That helped me distill a thought: Far too much of social media has become antisocial, and that’s something we need to change.

The problem and solutions become clearer if you think of Twitter (and social media broadly) as a big party with a seemingly unlimited number of people and rooms for everything from dancing to watching tv to talking about politics to processing trauma. 

One loud asshole probably won't ruin the whole party. It’s a big party, after all.

But what if every second person you encounter screams slurs and threats at you? 

Twitter insisted from the beginning that all voices deserved to be heard. There were always norms AGAINST blocking. Only the most egregious accounts were ever removed (and Elon restored nearly all of them).

That’s how Twitter fell victim to the Nazi Bar Problem. Antisocial behavior was allowed to flourish until it took over the whole thing. 

I joined Twitter in 2010, early enough to experience it as a magical if chaotic global town square.

I’ll never forget my first celebrity interaction or the afternoon thousands of us live-tweeted the Great Llama Escape. Back then, Twitter was fun. 

It was also serious. #YesAllWomen fundamentally reshaped my worldview, as did many conversations on race, class, and gender that followed. 

Twitter was bad before Elon took over, and it’s now virtually unusable. Elon’s changes to the algorithm and verification made it useless for breaking news and pushed blue-check trolls, scammers, and porn bots to the top of every comment thread. 

Over the last two years, I made a lot of excuses to stay at Elon’s party. “I’m not giving this place to the bullies,” or “But this is where the reporters are,” or “There’s not a better party anywhere else.” 

Well, the bullies already own the place, there’s a way better party happening down the street, and the reporters will follow the people who they want to talk to (which is not the bullies). 

The hosts of the old party told us to tolerate bad behavior in the interest of “the dialogue.” People who built clout scolding the libs are white hot mad that we opted out of their bad faith, one-way “dialogue.” 

The people whose animating desire is to “own the libs” are melting down, too. There are fewer and fewer libs to own on Twitter now. Bluesky’s pro-social norms and well-curated block lists help users nuke bad behavior before it starts. And when you tell the hosts someone is ruining the party for others, they act quickly. 

That’s a big fucking deal. Everyone from NFL and NHL analysts to political reporters, elected officials and celebrities are noticing that the quality of engagement is way higher. While Twitter had us obsessed with vanity metrics like reach, Dave Karpf nicely breaks down why quality is more important than quantity for everyone (except trolls and Elon).

Bluesky FEELS social in a good way. People are sharing pizza tips, favorite songs, and books and enjoying the “good lunch” feed without being flooded by threats or abuse. 

The architecture isn’t just built to keep bad behavior out, but to foster community building. Everyone from Flavor Flav to UltraViolet is using the Starter Packs feature (possibly the most genius pro-social behavior feature ever built) to help users build a network, and developers are building tools like Sky Follower Bridge to help you recreate your Twitter community.

As the new party gets going, Twitter is increasingly a ghost town. A tiny minority of Twitter users create a vast majority of Twitter’s original content. The power users are the people most subjected to abuse and spam, and Twitter’s feed is emptying as they excitedly switch to a more social environment.

Not that long ago, antisocial behavior had consequences. Racial slurs and openly misogynist language killed Republicans’ campaigns. While antisocial behavior was on the rise online before Trump, he ushered in a new era where it’s been fomented online and offline. 

So it’s with great joy that I see Elon’s extreme antisocial behavior coming back to bite him. As badly as he had degraded Twitter, it was finally his meddling in the election that kickstarted a real movement off his platform. 

Now, people are rediscovering that social media can only be social if there are consequences for antisocial behavior. 

Here’s hoping this can jump-start a course correction in a lot more venues. And at minimum, let’s protect this opportunity to find community and joy without letting people scold us into tolerating the intolerable. 

In the spirit of the post, I want to share a thing I love. One of my favorite ways things is sharing pie with friends. Since I can’t invite all of Melissa’s readers over for pie, I wanted to share a recipe I’ve been working on for years. I hope it brings a little joy to your life. Thanks so much to Melissa for giving me space in this excellent newsletter. 

P.S. If you or your organization wants to learn more about Bluesky, join us for a New Media Mentors panel on Thursday 11/21 at 3 p.m. ET. We’ll be talking about the Twitter #eXit and how to make the most of your Bluesky Era

Evan Sutton is the founder of Firekit Campaigns, a communications and digital firm that works with labor unions, Democratic candidates and mission-aligned organizations. You can find more rants on his Bluesky at evansutton.bsky.social