Content:
Liberals Are Left Out in the Cold as Social Media Veers Right
New York Times
11/17/2024
Joan Donovan, an assistant professor at Boston University and the founder of the Critical Internet Studies Institute, which studies how the internet is used to disrupt democracy, said Ms. Harris and her campaign operated in a hostile environment on many of the platforms, including X.
“The right was very clear in establishing their media spaces,” she said. “It was a very savvy and intentional effort by the right to fuse their party and political viewpoints with specific platforms.”
Several sites have emerged as X alternatives, including Blueskyand Mastodon. Bluesky, which launched in February 2023, has added more than one million users since the election, said Emily Liu, a spokeswoman for the platform, bringing its total to 15 million.
On Monday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, lauded Bluesky as a welcoming place.
“A thing I like here is it’s okay to have moments of happiness in public without being broadly scolded, and I believe that sustaining this kind of humanity will be very important as we resist fascism,” she wrote.
Still, Democrats have work to do, said Mr. Walzak, the political consultant.
Nobody is going about actually doing something to give Democratic Party supporters a social media space,” he said. “Nobody is building something for Democratic causes which can actually do what the current infrastructure does for Republican causes.
