The Knight Institute is putting its X account on hold, and we’re planning to spend the energy we would otherwise have spent on X on Bluesky instead. Many other X users have taken the same step, so we’re definitely not charting new territory here. Still, we thought we should explain our thinking.
The Institute was born in the Twitter era. We benefitted enormously from the relative breadth of ideas and the liveliness of debate on the platform, and from the connections it fostered with voices from the wide range of fields that inform and shape our work. We valued that diversity: our first major lawsuit challenged then-President Trump’s practice of blocking his critics on Twitter, and we built on that lawsuit with a series of others—against Republicans and Democrats alike—meant to ensure that public officials would be subject to First Amendment constraints when they used their social media accounts as extensions of their offices. We had complaints about Twitter, but there was a time when the platform worked for us—it gave us the ability to reach lots of different audiences, connected us with advocates and scholars, and put us in conversation with some of our critics.
Today’s X is a shadow of what Twitter once was, and so for the Institute it is a place of declining interest. On X, many of the pathologies of what’s sometimes called “surveillance capitalism” stand in glaring relief: the subordination of public interest to private caprice, the consolidation of influence over public discourse in the hands of a few (or even just one), the reliance on business models and monetization schemes that preclude a functional marketplace of ideas. Recently, X also became the first major platform to sue researchers investigating the platform’s impact on society, a move that hit particularly close to home given our work representing social media researchers and pushing for platform transparency. So X doesn’t work for the Institute in the way that Twitter once did, and X’s current owner, Elon Musk, has put the platform in conflict with the values the Institute is tasked with defending.
While we’re leaving X for now, we’re genuinely excited about the possibilities offered by Bluesky. It seems to us that Bluesky offers one of the most promising attempts to answer the problems of the tech giants’ model. In 2019 we published an essay by Mike Masnick titled “Protocols, Not Platforms,” in which he proposed developing interoperable, user-empowering networks to counter platform centralization and control—an essay that Jack Dorsey later cited as an inspiration for Bluesky. With its federated and now interoperable design, algorithmic choice for users to design and control their own feeds, and the beginnings of a business model outside of the surveillance-dependent, ad-driven structure of the social media giants, Bluesky has opened the space for more open and transparent information exchanges and for vibrant online discussions and communities where users rather than billionaires have ultimate control.
Bluesky will surely face challenges in the months ahead, and if those challenges breed changes that threaten to undermine its early promise, we won’t hesitate to demand better. For now, its biggest challenge will likely be to shed its early image as a sandbox for liberals and progressives. For our part, we’re interested in a Bluesky that’s lively, polyphonic, and truly diverse. We hope that’s what the platform will become, over time.
Follow the Knight Institute on Bluesky at @knightcolumbia.org, and please check out our Knight Institute starter pack as well, which includes scholars, litigators, and tech policy experts who have participated in Knight Institute initiatives relating to free speech and new technology.