The story of Twitter is one that has encompassed a huge portion of the social media era. The platform’s starting pitch was simple: create an online forum connecting people’s ideas to the rest of the world, so long as those ideas fall below 140 characters. One place where you can find anyone or do anything. It truly has been one of a kind since 2006.

Now, Twitter is old news and under new management with a new brand. In late 2022, the platform giant was purchased by billionaire CEO Elon Musk. Musk wasted no time in reforming the site into his view of free speech absolutism, famously saying that his goal was “upsetting the far right and far left equally,” according to NBC. 

It has been over 2 years since then. Twitter is now called X and the dream of political neutrality and free speech is questionable. Musk controversially suspended the accounts of several journalists and has been accused of using his platform to elevate the voice of the political right, often with his own personal account to achieve this goal through retweets.

Enter Bluesky, a former Twitter research initiative that went public in early 2024. With its more decentralized model, Bluesky quickly became a destination for former Twitter users who left following the Musk acquisition. Actor Mark Hamill called himself a “Twitter quitter” in one of his first Bluesky posts. 

The site currently has over 31.7 million users, a big blow to the once irreplaceable site. This user count is still far behind X, but maybe Bluesky doesn’t need to compete with X to be successful; it just needs to provide a platform for the refugees who do not want to use X, mostly those on the political left.

Officially, both Bluesky and X claim to be platforms of free speech, but informally, there are clear symbolic battle lines drawn between the two. The first Bluesky account to reach one million followers was owned by U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a well-known folk hero for the American left. Meanwhile, Musk joined the administration of President Donald Trump and has made himself politically active with right-wing parties in the U.S. and Europe.

This is certainly not to say that Twitter was dandy before Musk came along. After all, the users of social media are not the customers, they are the beneficiaries. Advertisers are the ones that pay, and they’re paying for access to your eyeballs. In order to achieve that goal, Twitter, alongside every other platform, was incentivized to allow for the echo chambers to form easily in order to keep up traffic in ways that truly unbiased platforms cannot. Still, we have never seen division to this scale on what was once a universally accepted platform by every part of the political spectrum because there was simply no alternative nor a desire for anyone to migrate to one.

Personally, I can’t help but feel that things have changed as a result of this. X and Bluesky are far from exclusively used for political purposes, yet the growing division has made each site synonymous with their perceived ideological lean. Merely having an account on one platform or the other incurs assumptions about the user’s political beliefs. Imagine an independent artist advertising their Bluesky account for their work, and people choosing not to follow it under the assumption that the artist’s beliefs don’t align with their own. Imagine the same situation in reverse with a celebrity who keeps their account on X. The mere label is enough to sow even more division in social media than there already is.

If Twitter was hit by this whole new brand of political division, then it can happen again. It’s only a matter of where. We’ve already seen much smaller social media platforms in the past with a clear political lean, going as far as to include certain dating apps. I find myself worried that this is our future: a world where people seek to limit their worldview to that of their own ideology. 

Resist the temptation. Even though it hurts, it’s healthy to engage in discourse, no matter how unseemly the anonymity of the internet makes it. Deep down, I don’t think we want a society segregated by ideological lean and it’s time that we make that clear to the people who profit off our eyeballs.

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Ian Stash is a junior studying Journalism at the University of Arizona. In his free time, he loves video games and chilling with his cats.