Tracking the evolution of political Bluesky in Massachusetts
Being on Bluesky since the November election has been like watching a political social network be hatched. You can almost hear David Attenborough narrating in the background.
The app - a more open version of Twitter/X - has attracted people who don’t wish to be in the algorithmically driven and Musk-corrupted alternative, and who have found Threads or Mastodon not to be a sufficient alternative. Growth has been rapid and it has been at the top of the charts in the app stores.
Much of our previous research into Twitter has studied how that app acted like a town square and communications platform for the political ecosystem, tracking how that declined over 2023 and, at least in Massachusetts, is no longer a useful platform. So I was curious to see whether Bluesky has been able to replace it and, if so, what are some of the early signs.
You can see the data on the top 500 accounts followed by Massachusetts elected officials, or keep reading for some of our initial takeaways.
It’s not a full network yet
One of the great things about the Golden Age of Twitter (2012-2021) was that it was the home for nearly every elected official, journalist, and analyst. That didn’t necessarily mean that it was great, but that a user could curate a feed to get a sense of what was being said, by who, about government and policy. Best of all, this could be done at the federal, state, and city level, just by following different accounts.
Bluesky is definitely not there yet. A crowdsourced attempt to find Massachusetts electeds produced only 35. Many were at the municipal level and the State House and federal delegation were woefully underrepresented.
The data was collected on Monday, November 18, and we’ll be tracking the adoption over time.
Progressives are the main group
Of those on the platform, progressives are the dominant faction and Boston and Somerville are the most represented.
This isn’t surprising, overall, since Bluesky is the alternative to the app owned by the man currently shadowing Donald Trump, and has attracted as its early adopters those on the left. But it is a bit startling to scan the list of electeds with accounts and realize how narrow a part of the political spectrum that they span. The most followed federal official (by elected officials) is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the most followed state-level official is Rep. Erika Uyterhoeven.
However, this is partially because it seems that many of the early adopters are from Somerville and Boston. Whether this is because those cities happen to have tech-savvy elected officials, or because they have tech-savvy advocacy communities that encourage elected officials to be there, or because many had already left Twitter a while ago, I’ll leave up to others to parse out.
Michelle Wu is the current leader
Top ten most followed accounts by Massachusetts elected officials
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is the most followed elected official on Bluesky by other Massachusetts elected officials, more even than Sen. Ed Markey or Rep. Ayanna Pressley.
Wu was known as a prolific tweeter, whose social media postings and interaction with constituents helped carry her from the City Council to the mayoralty, before she largely stopped in early 2023. It makes sense that she is a well-followed account, as not just a source of news of what’s happening in the city but also, for lack of a better phrase, as a content creator.
The most-followed also show why Bluesky may start to exceed Twitter in political utility. The top ten include WBUR, GBH, Universal Hub, the Boston Globe, and Codcast host Steve Koczela. Twitter was great as a real-time wire service but this declined as the For You feed incentivized engagement and links were penalized.
If Bluesky enables a better news experience, that could be a major draw for elected officials to sign up, since that was one of the main use cases for a group of people who are constantly reacting to and need to know what reporters are publishing.
It shows just how bad Twitter has gotten and what political social media needs
I’ve enjoyed my own time on Bluesky so far. But it’s not a complicated product. It’s basically Twitter from ten years ago with a few small additions.
That shows that what the political world needs for a useful social media site is:
primarily-text based posts
ability to reply, repost, quote post
critical mass of people in a particular community
ability to post links to other websites
That Bluesky fits this bill and Twitter doesn’t is really just an indictment of Twitter, especially under Elon Musk.
Creating a default algorithmic feed that promotes Musk’s own tweets interspersed with the most outrageous and hottest of takes meant the feed became more noise and less signal. Boosting the replies of those that paid $8/month meant that the discussion element of Twitter was egregiously degraded. Having a platform manipulated by someone who became so polarizing drove away significant users.
I’m hopeful that Bluesky will eventually replace Twitter, at least for how it functioned for political news. We’ve already built a bot to post links to our Massachusetts content on Legislata and it didn’t require an expensive API account like on the other site. Please feel free to follow and let us know what else we can build for Bluesky to make it a better platform for following what’s happening in our government.
