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BLUESKY PROVES STAGNANT MONOPOLIES ARE STRANGLING THE INTERNET  
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Ryan Cooper
January 6, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ One tiny company has the bloated Facebook empire scrambling to
respond. _

, Matteo Della Torre/NurPhoto via AP

 

One bright spot in the bleak year of 2024 was the rise of Bluesky. As
someone who relied greatly on Twitter for news and my career—OK, I
may have been somewhat addicted—before Elon Musk bought it and
turned it into a snake pit of neo-Nazi filth, it was nice to see a
Twitter-like replacement rise to relative prominence.

I joined in April 2023 [[link removed]] as
about the 47,000th user. Today, Bluesky has about 26 million users
[[link removed]], and seems to be growing healthily. It
actually has some notable improvements on Twitter, like the “starter
pack” function where users can put together a group of accounts that
one can follow at once (here’s the starter pack for _Prospect_
writers
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incidentally), or the “nuclear block” where if one participant in
a conversation blocks the other, the entire conversation is zapped.
This greatly cuts down on Twitter’s culture of aggressive pile-ons
and abuse.

Unlike any other big platform, Bluesky does not censor posts with
outgoing links. Indeed, it does not have any proprietary “for you”
algorithm, instead defaulting to a traditional reverse-chronological
feed, and allowing users to pick from algorithms that can be developed
by others. This has major implications for publishers: Despite its
modest size, _The Guardian_ reports
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that Bluesky traffic has already outstripped that from Twitter, and
here at the _Prospect_ Bluesky traffic now regularly matches Twitter
and is many times that of Facebook.

This ability to share outside the platform is proving so popular that
Facebook’s Twitter clone, Threads, has belatedly altered its
algorithm
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to include more posts from accounts you follow in an attempt to
compete. And this disruption is being done on a shoestring
budget—Bluesky has just 20 employees
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and about $23 million
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in funding, as compared to Meta’s 70,000+ workers
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and $156 billion
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in annual revenue.

It’s strong evidence that there is a large unmet demand for internet
systems outside of the control of Big Tech monopolists. I don’t know
if there can be a similar option for every walled garden on the
internet—it’s hard to dislodge a giant—but there’s no question
that there’s a lot of pent-up demand.

THE HISTORY OF HOW THE BIG PLATFORMS got big is not that different
from the history of any kind of market rollup. Back in the 1990s when
the internet was first taking off, there was an explosion of millions
of different websites—home pages, forums, blogs, retailers, you name
it.

This started to change as technology evolved. In the ’90s, any
reasonably clever person could learn how to code a website after a few
nights of studying HTML. But as websites became more complicated,
creating one quickly outstripped the technical skills of all but the
most dedicated hobbyists. It became much easier to simply use someone
else’s tools—first site development services like Blogspot or
WordPress, and then separate platforms like Facebook and Twitter,
where you could establish a presence simply by maintaining an account.

Then, as billions of people got online, network effects started to
take hold. Once a critical mass of users ended up on one platform or
another, most people joined up to be in the same place. This growth
was critically dependent on the American legal structure, particularly
Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. When you are
hosting your own website, you are legally liable for the content you
post on it. A television news program or magazine like the _Prospect_
can be sued if they publish false and damaging claims about someone.
(That’s why we fact-check our reporting.)

Section 230 stipulates that if you own a platform where _others_ post,
you are largely immune from lawsuits. Ironically, the idea was to
actually encourage content moderation, because at the time there was a
fear that websites that did moderate would be legally vulnerable as
compared to those that took a totally hands-off approach. In reality,
Section 230 enabled the growth of gigantic platform monopolies, which
do as little moderation as they can get away with.

This remained true even when the platforms started implementing
black-box, attention-maximizing algorithms that control what their
users see. Feeding people content by algorithm is indisputably
publishing by any realistic definition—it’s not much different
from self-selecting a bundle of stories and putting them into the
morning edition of a newspaper. Yet Section 230 still protects the
platforms.

Gradually, most of the vast ecosystem of independent sites died off,
replaced by platform accounts. Fast-forward to today, and a handful of
monster platforms dominate the internet: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube,
TikTok, Snapchat, Amazon, Google, and so on. As a rule, they do
everything possible to keep you on the platform and scrolling, so they
can sell more ads or products.

The results have been a catastrophe for humanity across the globe. The
best way to grab and keep attention is inflammatory, anger-inducing
content—above all, hate speech and conspiracy theories. As Steve
Randy Waldman writes [[link removed]],
“Section 230 has created artificial and destructive economies of
scale.” In the worst cases, as when Facebook barges into poor
countries offering free access to its platform but not bothering to
hire many (or any) moderators speaking the native languages, the
result is an instantaneous explosion in racism and hate crimes
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In Myanmar, this proceeded to genocide
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But even in rich countries, social media platforms are associated with
a rise in bigotry and violence. In Germany, Facebook use seemed to
cause a spike in attacks on refugees
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South Korea’s very president attempted a coup and nearly touched off
a nuclear war, reportedly because he cooked his brain
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on right-wing, Korean-language YouTube.

There are many potential solutions here. As Waldman suggests, we could
repeal Section 230, at least for big algorithmic platforms, forcing
them to moderate much more heavily so they restore some level of
internal responsibility. Or as my colleague David Dayen suggested
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years ago, we could ban surveillance advertising, and hence make the
targeted, algorithmic feed impossible.

Any such change is very unlikely under a Trump presidency. But what
Bluesky proves is that the platforms have gotten fat and lazy.
Facebook today is a buggy, slow mess with a bewildering user interface
and a feed full of AI slop and other garbage. Facebook is even
inserting AI-generated chatbots into user feeds
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which has spawned mass outrage. Meanwhile, Twitter/X is a fascist
hellscape. YouTube is somewhat better, but plainly has some work to do
in its non-English-speaking regions. So the minute a tiny bridge over
the platforms’ moat of market power appeared, a flood of users
rushed over it.

The old internet wasn’t perfect, but it used to feel like a place of
almost magical potential, where you might stumble over a fascinating
new site at any moment, instead of watching in horror as your aunt is
driven mad by flat-earth conspiracies. This internet did not die of
its own accord; it was murdered by a handful of mega-billionaires so
they could sell ads for chukka boots and washing machines.

Even with the platforms’ overwhelming market dominance, there is an
opportunity for a company to establish itself as the nexus for an
old-fashioned internet of independent sites. Bluesky may or may not
end up there, and at a fraction of Meta’s user base for Facebook and
Instagram, it’s not going to topple the leviathans by itself. But
it’s the most promising new development online in decades. I hope it
develops a monetization strategy that’s not dependent on
surveillance advertising; I for one would happily pay a monthly
subscription to be the customer rather than the product. But the fact
that a company this microscopic has Big Tech behemoths flailing around
to compete for the first time in years is a good sign.

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Ryan Cooper is the Prospect’s managing editor, and author of ‘How
Are You Going to Pay for That?: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question
in Politics.’ He was previously a national correspondent for The
Week

* Bluesky; Media; Facebook;
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