The invite-only, decentralized new social network, explained.
As Elon Musk continues to make drastic changes to Twitter, a new competitor called Bluesky is rising up — and an invite to it is the hottest social media ticket in town.
Originally started by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Bluesky has recently taken off with an influential crew of media and celebrities. Some of the big names that have joined in the past few days include New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Chrissy Teigen, Twitter comedic legend Dril, and prominent journalists from publications like the New York Times and CNN. On Thursday, Bluesky said that Thursday represented its biggest single-day jump in new users that it had experienced so far, up 100 percent from the day before.
“A/s/l?” posted Teigen on Friday morning — referencing the early internet chatroom acronym — in the kind of inside online humor that’s popular on the platform.
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screenshot of Bluesky
Part of the app’s appeal is its exclusivity. Right now, there’s a scramble for people to secure a coveted invite code, and it’s a bit of a mystery how Bluesky is dishing those out and letting people off the waiting list.
“My DMs are full of people asking me for an invite right now,” said NBC News reporter Ben Collins, who started using the app on Thursday. Collins added he’s ready to embrace an alternative to Twitter, which for him “has been rendered almost unusable for getting information in the moment.” Musk has recently made several controversial changes to Twitter, like changing its verification system and prioritizing paid accounts in people’s feeds, that have made it harder for many people to quickly find credible sources of news.
Bluesky is hardly the only platform vying to be a Twitter alternative. Competitors like Mastodon, Post News, and Artifact have all gained attention in the months following Musk’s takeover, but Bluesky has managed to set itself apart. Some say it’s because of the site’s irreverent vibe — many users are calling posts “skeets” — or simply how easy it is to use.
At first glance, Bluesky looks a lot like Twitter. You can post short messages of up to 300 characters and toggle between an algorithmically sorted feed or a chronological one. But behind the scenes, Bluesky is built differently: It is an open, decentralized network. That means when you join, you have to join a specific server with its own unique set of rules, interests, and users‚ similar to the also popular social media app Mastodon. For now, Bluesky has set up one main server that everyone is on, but in the future, people will be able to customize their own algorithms and feeds using Bluesky’s underlying technology.
It’s too soon to say whether Bluesky will keep gaining traction and become a popular alternative to Twitter. It could also quickly fade into obscurity, like the many trendy social apps before it, including Clubhouse and BeReal. But Bluesky does appear to be the most serious contender we’ve had for a Twitter replacement just yet. And its timing — sending out a blast of invites just as Musk plows ahead with controversial product decisions at Twitter — is perfect.
So, what exactly makes Bluesky interesting, and what are people talking about there? Here’s a brief rundown of what you need to know about the buzzy new app.
Bluesky’s backstory: A decentralized social media protocol backed by Twitter’s co-founder
While Bluesky launched a public beta version in February, its origins go back to 2019, when Twitter co-founder and then-CEO Jack Dorsey announced that he was funding a small team within Twitter to develop an “open and decentralized standard for social media.” It was intended to serve as a “protocol” for other apps and social media networks, including Twitter itself one day.
Bluesky became independent of Twitter in early 2022, well before the Musk-Twitter deal closed. It was set up as a public benefit limited liability company, meaning it’s supposed to operate in a more socially responsible way than a regular company. Bluesky also fits into Web3 principles of a less hierarchical, more distributed vision of social media.
Even though it’s decentralized by design (more on that later), Bluesky is currently giving users access to a centralized experience on the main server it has set up. So what does that all look like?
Design-wise, the app looks a lot like Twitter. It has a “What’s hot” and a “Following” feed, similar to the algorithmic “For You” and the chronological “Following” feeds on Twitter. For now, you can only post text or pictures on Bluesky (there’s no video and no DM feature yet). But it’s still early days, so we’ll likely see more features rolling out soon.
Now back to that decentralized concept. The idea is that Bluesky wants to give users more control over their social media experience — control over their own data as well as what content they see when they log in. The company is doing this by building an underlying protocol that works a bit like the Android OS. Unlike a more traditional social media platform that designs the experience and makes the rules, Bluesky provides a framework on which users can build their own social media apps.
So in the future, Bluesky could spawn a whole generation of new apps with feeds that are tailored to different kinds of interests, like a news-heavy feed, cat memes, or a feed that’s more or less profane. Bluesky also wants to let users easily transfer their own data like their username and followers to other apps if they so choose.
“Users will also be able to control the algorithms that determine what content is served to them,” Bluesky wrote in an October 2022 company blog post. “We must have control over our algorithms if we’re going to trust in our online spaces.”
It’s apparent, though, that it’s early days and there are major parts of content moderation the app is still figuring out, like how to block people.
What’s drawing users in: Fewer meanies, more weirdos
On a technical level, Bluesky is definitely different from major social media apps, including Twitter. But the difference people really care about is simple: People using it are less mean and are having more fun (so far).
“There’s something so refreshing about scrolling through a feed and seeing posts from accounts you follow that are funny instead of accounts that you don’t follow and think you don’t deserve rights,” posted Friday by a user who goes by “em.”
That’s in contrast to what some people say they’re experiencing on Twitter these days. Twitter has controversially allowed previously suspended neo-Nazis and other extremist figures back on Twitter in line with Musk’s “free speech absolutist” ideology, and recently rolled back some hate speech protections for trans users. Musk has said that he’s decreasing the visibility of negative tweets and that hate speech has gone down since he took over, but outside researchers have tracked a rise in racial and homophobic slurs on the platform since Musk took over.
Bluesky’s approach also stands apart from Twitter’s new approach of more laissez-faire content moderation as well as its old, more heavily moderated one. Bluesky’s moderation is largely user-driven.
With a few straightforward settings, the app lets individuals decide whether they want to hide or show — or warn before showing — certain kinds of content like “explicit sexual images,” “political hate groups,” or “violent/bloody content.” The company also says it takes a “first pass” on moderating its central server in order to remove illegal content and label “objectionable material.”
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screenshot of Bluesky
But beyond moderation, for now, it seems people are encountering less hate on Bluesky simply because of who’s on it: writers, some politicians and Twitter-famous people, tech enthusiasts, and people looking to escape the angry trolling of major social media networks.
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screenshot of Bluesky
Bluesky is full of people cracking internet jokes and starting quirky memes, but without the default angry tone that’s become so common on Twitter.
So part of the appeal of Bluesky — which currently does feel similar to early Twitter — is that you have some serious people posting not-so-serious things, and famous people replying to not-famous people. When user April King, for example, posted asking if she needed to “start acting responsibly now that AOC follows me?” none other than AOC herself replied “no” with a relaxed-face emoji.
If Bluesky can manage to keep the good vibes flowing between media people, politically important people, and Very Online people, it could have lasting power.
“Weirdos are the people who drive news,” said Collins. “Interesting content only comes from weirdos, that’s what makes platforms live or die.”
From Super Mario to the Little Mermaid, websites like the Daily Wire and the Washington Examiner sure have a lot of opinions.
Is the blockbuster success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie a victory for the “anti-woke”?
Well, according to right-wing media pundits like Charlie Kirk, Steven Crowder, and Alex Jones, it sure is, mostly because of how the film’s producers ignored public calls to cast Italian American voice actors in the cartoon roles of Mario and Luigi. Yet if you check the Washington Examiner, you can read all about “The Super Mario Bros. Movie’s Invisible Wokeness,” which has something to do with the video game’s Princess Peach being elevated from a damsel-in-distress to a goomba-kicking action heroine. For further analysis, why not consult the Daily Wire, the news site that has become something of an industry leader for conservative pop culture coverage? Here, you can find a detailed breakdown of the issue under the headline “Woke, Or Anti-Woke? The Super Mario Bros. Movie Sparks Debate Among Conservatives About Setting the Bar Too Low.”
If all of this seems like a lot, just wait for later this month when Disney releases its long-awaited live-action remake of The Little Mermaid starring Black actress Halle Bailey in the titular role. Matt Walsh, a Daily Wire contributor, already kicked off the discourse way back in September when the first teaser trailer dropped, courting accusations of racism by remarking on his podcast that “from a scientific perspective, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have someone with darker skin who lives deep in the ocean.”
Yes, from Black mermaids and hobbits to “girlboss” princesses and Jedi knights — not to mention drag queens and trans TikTok stars — today’s right-wing media commentators have no shortage of opinions when it comes to pop culture. For that, we have the “Breitbart Doctrine” to thank, a.k.a. the theory that changed everything, which has convinced a generation of right-wing media professionals that, as the late right-wing commentator Andrew Breitbart said, “politics is downstream from culture.” Yet this was not always the case.
According to journalists and editors who cover the entertainment industry for conservative news outlets, the current pop culture obsession in right-wing media represents a significant break with its own past. I spoke to over a dozen of these professionals while researching my book Pop Culture, Politics, and the News: Entertainment Journalism in the Polarized Media Landscape, and they characterized the shift as a recent one, and audience-driven.
Previously, in the wake of the great cultural schisms that embittered the right beginning in the 1960s, the target market for conservative news tended to have little overlap with the audience for youth-skewing mainstream Hollywood entertainment. In fact, many members of this mostly older, conservative news audience could be described as deliberate “pop culture avoiders,” actively shunning Hollywood products due to their perceptions of their irredeemable moral depravity and left-wing bias.
If this audience sees mainstream pop culture as something entirely foreign and alienating to them, then it is understandable that they would prefer not to see, hear, or read about it all. Indeed, when confronted with this kind of coverage in their favorite conservative news outlets, the reaction has been historically so unfavorable that these outlets were essentially forced to be “pop culture avoiders” themselves.
For decades, this negative audience feedback loop has played out time and time again in the offices of conservative media outlets. The journalists I spoke to recounted how whenever they would talk about Hollywood entertainment in their work — even when harshly criticizing it from a right-wing point of view — they would inevitably get angry emails from, as one put it, “cranky old people” who complained that the entire topic was so unseemly that it was unworthy of their attention.
However, in recent years, the tide has been starting to turn. Younger members of the conservative news audience, so it seems, are far more pop culture-savvy than their elders, even to the point of being full-throated pop culture fans. For this younger audience, the entertainment industry is viewed not as a lost cause to shun, but rather as a battlefield to be conquered in the name of the right. As one conservative pop culture commentator noted regarding his audience, “When I started, they weren’t talking about this, and now they are, and now they pay attention. And the younger they are, the more they pay attention.”
In the eyes of many in the right-wing news media, the audience’s burgeoning embrace of a “pop culture war” mentality has come not a moment too soon, as they have been convinced for quite some time that the entertainment field must be one of their central focal points. Such a philosophy is largely attributable to the influence of the late Andrew Breitbart, the right-wing media entrepreneur behind the famous “politics is downstream from culture” phrase that has become enshrined over time in conservative circles as the “Breitbart Doctrine.”
By “culture,” Breitbart wasn’t just referring to culture war issues in the broadest sense, like debates about gay people and abortions. He meant, quite literally, pop culture. As he wrote in his book Righteous Indignation, published a year before his sudden passing in 2012, “Hollywood is more important than Washington. … What happens in front of the cameras on a soundstage at the Warner Bros. lot often makes more difference to the fate of America than what happens in the backrooms … on Capitol Hill.”
Inside the offices of right-wing media outlets, the “downstream from culture” line is repeated over and over as a kind of mantra — indeed, it was the first thing to come up, unprompted, in nearly every interview I conducted. For over a decade now, this “Breitbart Doctrine” has urged conservative journalists and editors to take on pop culture as one of their primary political battlegrounds, and it appears as though the audience is finally starting to catch on.
Certainly, Breitbart was not the first pundit to attack Hollywood from the right. As far back as the 1990s, one could find relatively high-minded cultural commentary and even film reviews from writers like Jonah Goldberg and John Podhoretz in the pages of National Review. Also on the menu for conservative critics of yore were intermittent servings of “moral panic” aimed at sex, violence, and anti-Christian sentiment in mainstream entertainment (and even further back in time, during McCarthyism, conservative-minded newspaper columnists like Walter Winchell and Hedda Hopper were known for railing against suspected communists in Hollywood, even naming names and destroying careers in the process). But Breitbart’s enduring legacy is that he was the first to introduce a consistent, day-to-day editorial focus on pop culture topics from a right-wing partisan perspective at an institutional level.
His mission of embracing entertainment as a means of positively advancing a conservative political agenda, rather than decrying and shunning it altogether, is also key to his vision — Breitbart was a self-described “pop culture-infused, wannabe hipster” and former Hollywood employee who got his start delivering scripts, and he initially aspired to a career as a comedy writer. His subsequent disaffection with an entertainment industry establishment that treated conservatives like him “as though they suffer from highly contagious leprosy,” and his vow to take it over from the outside with his own media empire, now reads as a kind of “villain origin story” in the right’s broader push into pop culture warfare.
Prior to the “Breitbart Doctrine,” the conservative movement’s take on mainstream entertainment media was largely one of scandalized moral outrage over the supposed corruption of youth — if and when it was paying attention to pop culture at all. The film critic Michael Medved epitomized this approach with his 1992 book Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values, in which he longed for the good old pre-1960s days, when Hollywood movies were produced under the strict Motion Picture Production Code and offered safe, sanitized fun for the whole family. This narrow focus on Hollywood’s seeming violations of Christian family values represents an older paradigm — these days, you don’t hear much from right-wing media about excessive violence in entertainment (and on the rare occasion that you do, critics are quick to point out the glaring hypocrisy of the right denouncing fictional violence at the same time as it has increasingly embraced Donald Trump’s very real violent rhetoric).
By contrast, you’ll surely hear a lot of grumbling from conservative commentators every time a movie franchise casts a woman or a performer of color in a role that was previously played by a white man. In the post-Breitbart paradigm, pop culture is framed not just as morally decadent but also, and far more importantly, as “woke” — the right’s new favorite buzzword to describe any and all cultural output (or public policy, or anything for that matter) that is imbued with left-progressive social values.
The right’s mounting battle against “woke” pop culture makes a lot more sense when considering its growing anxieties over the loss of social status. As political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart argue in the book Cultural Backlash, status anxiety is perhaps the key driving force behind today’s right-wing populism and grievance politics. Ultimately, what is at stake is a sense of esteem — that feeling of being at the top of the social and cultural ladder and having that position constantly reflected back to you in the media. Anxieties about the loss of social status help account for why topics as seemingly trivial as casting news for cartoon and mermaid movies now loom so large in the right-wing media’s imagination — to no small degree, pop culture provides the perfect microcosm for aggrieved straight white men to chart their diminishing social dominance in real time. It’s a convenient symbolic target to which they can channel their anger.
Today’s right-wing news media establishment is not merely content to throw spitballs at “woke” Hollywood. As one editor at a conservative news site told me, the goal is to “engage with culture,” not just rage at it. After all, Breitbart’s vision was all about the right’s long-term political success being dependent on its cultural success, or, as he bluntly put it in Righteous Indignation, “young people suckle at the teat of popular culture—but by refusing to fight for their attention, we lose by default.”
Figures like the Daily Wire’s Candace Owens, who has achieved notoriety for cozying up to “canceled” celebrities just as much as mocking those that she deems “woke,” offer a signpost of where this is all headed in the long term. In February 2021, the Daily Wire even went as far as inking a film production deal with fired Mandalorian actor and extremely online Trump supporter Gina Carano, which company co-founder Ben Shapiro heralded as the dawn of “the cultural resistance.”
The conservative news media may have shunned entertainment in the past out of a market necessity, but now they are increasingly eager to get into the business and take their audience with them. Their first release, however, the notably violent Carano-starring Terror on the Prairie, was widely deemed a failure after its feeble box office showing and complaints from conservatives that it was not sufficiently right-wing. For now, they’re still mostly stuck championing ostensibly “anti-woke” entertainment success stories like The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and fomenting jeers and backlash. Still, they’re certainly not done trying to paddle their way upstream.
Joel Penney is an associate professor of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University and the author of Pop Culture, Politics, and the News: Entertainment Journalism in the Polarized Media Landscape, published in 2022 by Oxford University Press.
Some more people might get jobs. What about those who don’t?
House Republicans want to cut spending as a condition for raising the debt ceiling — but they have proven unwilling to make major cuts to the three biggest components of the federal budget: Social Security, Medicare, and the military. And so their just-passed spending plan focuses heavily on what’s left: mostly, programs for the poor.
The Lift, Save, Grow Act, the House GOP’s opening bid in the debt ceiling drama, would add work requirements to Medicaid — the health insurance program for low-income Americans — and expand those in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or “food stamps”) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF, often called “cash welfare”).
Requiring people to work to be eligible for social program benefits doesn’t save much money in the scheme of things; the Congressional Budget Office found it would save about $120 billion over 10 years, or 0.2 percent of the 10-year budget. But they could have a major impact on the low-income families that rely on these programs. The White House (hardly a disinterested party, but still) projects the Medicaid provisions could put 21 million people at risk of losing their health insurance. (Roughly 90 million Americans currently receive Medicaid benefits.)
Defenders of work requirements for social programs tend to point to evidence that they, well, “work” — that is, that when work requirements are in place, more benefit recipients wind up employed, which they argue is better than the unemployed passively receiving benefits.
One response from opponents is to dispute the evidence. Arkansas, the first state to introduce Medicaid work requirements in 2018, saw no increases in employment as a result, even as the share of the population without health insurance surged. As my colleagues Alvin Chang and Tara Golshan noted a few years ago, a review of several randomized experiments with work requirements for cash welfare found that while they boost employment noticeably early on, the effects fade quickly with time:
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Chart by Alvin Chang and Tara Golshan
Let me make a slightly different argument. I think it’s plausible that work requirements modestly increase work in the short or even long term. But I think they are still a bad idea, because of the effects on the people for whom they do not “work.”
Work requirements inevitably leave in their wake a large group — maybe 20 percent, maybe 30 — who do not or cannot work after their implementation. Those people are then left without either wages or support from the government program that’s now kicked them out. Applied to food stamps and Medicaid, that means creating a group of people who have no cash income, no means of buying food, and no health insurance.
The prospect of abandoning a large group of Americans to that fate should trouble us greatly.
Who is left behind when you add work requirements?
Work requirements are not new. SNAP currently has work requirements for able-bodied adults age 18 to 49 without dependents. The Limit, Save, Grow Act would apply these requirements to people from age 50-55.
Medicaid currently has no work requirements (the Arkansas experiment was blocked by a court). The House bill would change that. Adults aged 19 to 55 without dependents would have to work, do community service, or engage in work training for at least 80 hours a month (about 18 hours a week) to receive Medicaid.
Let’s suppose these requirements, put together, would be startlingly effective at raising 50 to 55-year-olds’ work participation. Let’s say out of the population of adults that age, without dependents, receiving both SNAP and Medicaid, the share holding a job would go from 55 percent (the current level for childless people on Medicaid) to 70 percent. That would be an enormous effect in the context of past work requirements, a huge success.
My question is: What would happen to the 30 percent of people who didn’t find work (or a training program, or a community service opportunity)? If the work requirements were vigorously enforced (as they would have to be to generate the budgetary savings the GOP wants), these people would lose their monthly food benefit. They would no longer have health insurance if they got sick. And they would not have a job. They would have no source of cash income or government support whatsoever.
We don’t really have a recent precedent for so thoroughly abandoning a group of Americans. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton signed a welfare reform bill establishing strict work requirements on cash welfare — but he did so only because no such requirements were imposed on parents’ access to food stamps or Medicaid. He had vetoed two earlier GOP bills that attempted to limit those programs, later telling journalist Jason DeParle, “I thought there ought to be a national guarantee of health care and nutrition.” After welfare reform, the share of people with no income except for food stamps rose sharply.
What the House GOP is now proposing is to pull that safety net out from under the very poorest. If you are someone who can’t meet the new requirements in the world the House GOP is contemplating, you will not have a guarantee of health care and nutrition to fall back on. You will have nothing but private charity and desperate hope.
One sees a similar dynamic at work with disability insurance. The Social Security Disability Insurance program absolutely discourages people from working. There are excellent, rigorous studies proving this, and it annoys me when otherwise like-minded friends try, in defending the program, to pretend that this isn’t true. The reason to keep SSDI, and to not cut it, isn’t that it has zero effect on work. It’s that efforts to reform it and kick participants off will inevitably throw out people who will still be out of work, disabled, and now extremely poor.
A famous study measuring the effect of disability insurance found that in a group of applicants they examined, 52.2 percent of people denied benefits wound up working and earning at least $1,000 after two years; that compares to only 14.8 percent of people granted benefits who ended up working. That’s a big negative effect on employment.
But think about the 47.8 percent of rejected applicants who still were not working. They’re not getting any earnings, and they’re not getting any disability benefits. They’re just very, very poor. Don’t we owe them something? Would toughening up eligibility to force those who could be pressured to work to do so be worth impoverishing this other population, who wouldn’t work either way? Who perhaps couldn’t, physically, work either way?
Work is a good thing. But mercy is a good thing too. There has been a rough consensus, reflected in government policy, in the United States that poor people should not starve, whether or not they work. They should not die for lack of medical care. There should be a (patchwork, imperfect) safety net to prevent the absolute worst possible outcomes.
The moral case against work requirements isn’t that they don’t work, but that they can never work perfectly. There will always be people kicked off benefits who also do not or cannot work — and they will be without any economic resources at all in one of the richest nations the world has ever known.