Leaving X? Where Next? On Bluesky, Threads and the “Fediverse”

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Eli. Oh my God, dude.
Wow. Look at this stache.
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There's no laughing here. You have found yourself.
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This is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. And you can find me on Instagram, threads, blue sky, even on LinkedIn.
But don't go looking for me on X. I'm out.
I got on X in 2007, if you can believe it. I was one of the earliest people there.
I wrote some of the earliest stories about the company as it shifted from a company called Odeo into what was Twitter. And I've known the company for a very long time through all its ups and downs, and it's had a lot of them.
I loved the platform when I started using it because it was exciting, it was interesting, it was real-time, it was news in real-time. I thought it was best at breaking stories, finding people you didn't agree with necessarily, and meeting people, really.
It was a really fun platform. I didn't like Facebook as much, and I really liked the quickness.
It soon became very addictive. It started to sour for me some pretty much after Elon bought it.
I have called it a Nazi porn bar. My final straw was all the anger and really nasty stuff that was being uploaded to me by blue checks.
I had an early blue check. I was one of the early recommendations on Twitter.
And it just was people who felt they could say anything to me and they can't do it in real life. And so they shouldn't be able to do it to me on Twitter.
It wasn't a question of disagreeing with me. It was really vile stuff.
And I just, it was bad for my health and not just that. I just don't want to listen to these idiots.
And so I got off of it. I'm not alone, by the way.
People have been calling it the exodus. More than 280,000 people worldwide left ex the day after the election.
Many of them have switched to mainly posting on established platforms like Instagram, which is growing. Some have joined more nascent sites like Threads, and also Blue Sky, this new little contender who has a very different point of view about moderation and friendliness and making it a sort of a nicer place to be, sort of like Twitter used to be before it all went south.
And there's a lot of people who aren't sure where to go. There's other choices like LinkedIn and Mastodon and so many others.
So today we're going to go deep on what's happening at X, what kind of communities and cultures are emerging on these different social media sites, and how some are fundamentally different and what it could mean for the role that social media plays going forward. We're also going to talk about the end of being monolithic.
There may be a lot of different fractionalization of social media, something I've talked about for the past two years. And so I found really great guests to discuss this.
They are Neelay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge and host of The Decoder podcast, New York Times tech correspondent Mike Isaac, wonderful reporter, used to work for me, and The Wall Street Journal tech reporter Alexa Kors, who's done some really terrific reporting on what's happening in this very interesting space. It's getting very innovative and interesting now.

Our question this week comes from former CNN anchor, now YouTube anchor Don Lemon.

He has left X for good.

Don is also suing Elon Musk for refusing to pay him over a million dollars after a content deal

between the two imploded after Lemon's contentious interview with Musk earlier this year.

So obviously that's going to be interesting. So let's get to it.
Alexa, Neelay, Mike, welcome. Thanks for being on ON.
Thank you. Thanks.
Yeah, Alexa just was subjected to our reminiscences because both Neelay and Mike and I worked together for many, many years. So I apologize in advance.
I'm a new kid, but glad to be here. Glad you're here.
So today we're going to be talking about the exodus from X to social media platforms like Blue Sky and Threads. I stopped posting back in February.
I feel great. It actually makes me feel better.
I started to get really attacked, which had never happened before Elon took over. And it just wasn't useful.
It was like constantly blocking people and sorting through dreck. And I do that on other sites, but it got really bad.
But let's start with taking a very non-representative poll of this group. Are you still on X, Why or why not? What other social media platforms are

you on? And which is your go-to now and why? And maybe use them for different things. Let's start with you, Alexa.
I am still on X. And honestly, the main reason is it's the company I write about the most.
So I need to pay attention to it. People who care about it are still there who I want to talk to.
I am more of a lurker on others, but like many people, I recently redownloaded Blue Sky. Threads, I find, has been useful for following other tech journalists, although maybe Blue Sky is taking that place now.
But you don't use those yourself, personally? I don't post that much on them. Is there one that's your go-to, like LinkedIn? I don't know.
Honestly, I mean, you guys laugh, but I feel like LinkedIn is delivering the best value in a lot of ways for work. And I feel like they're encouraging reporters to post.
Yeah, absolutely. No, I joke about it.
LinkedIn is quite a normal service. Neelay? LinkedIn is funny because they're running an old playbook.
They're paying people to post videos on it. Oh, wow.
Which is a very Facebook video 2014, 2016 playbook. Cheryl asked us to do that.
Maybe a little destroy some media companies along the way. I mean, we all have to grow up.
I quit X ages ago. I actually took a break from what I called algorithmic media.
It was just I could feel that it had changed me. And Elon buying X and taking it to what it became, it was just a good time for me to stop it.
So I took a big break for a minute. I joined Threads, and I use Threads pretty heavily.
But the Threads algorithm is just punishing. What I want to use it for is news and real-time conversation, and it just doesn't want you to do that.
Yeah, we'll get to that in a sec. Yeah, so like many people, I've moved all of that to Blue Sky in the past couple weeks.
That has been where I've spent most of my time. Wow.
There's some apps that I post to both. I'm going to start exploring those.
But I think Blue Sky is the one that, at least for the news gathering function of what I do, is going to be more useful. Mike? Yeah, I'm still on Twitter.
Sorry, I can't even call it X now. It's just Twitter in my brain, basically.
And I am, I do, but it is drastically worse for me as an experience. I think the verification program that he did really ruined it because a lot of the fun for me was in the replies and just seeing funny people or interesting people or insights.
And now you can pay to game that. And you see just either bots or the dumbest people alive replying to things and not really getting the same sort of fun things.
So I'm definitely on it less. There's probably a justification in my brain that I do it for my job.
And look, all of VC and tech, hardcore tech people are still kind of on there a lot. The CEOs, the VCs kind of just talk to each other there.
So that's how I justify it. But as far as the fun I once had, that's definitely not there.
Threads has not really clicked for me. I think, similar to Nilay, it's like the algorithmic stuff is not super great.
But Blue Sky has been its own kind of interesting insular culture that I've had to navigate. And it is fun, though.
I do think it's, like, proto-Twitter 2010 days of, like, people kind of messing around. And I missed that whimsy, I think.
So like I'm playing over there. And then like Instagram also is basically something that I use.
But I do think it's like more personal stuff over there. And I don't know how worky I want to get it.
So I'm not on LinkedIn, though. I mean, I'm not using it.
Maybe I should. I don't know.
You're on it, though. I mean, I have it, but it's like, I'll talk to like Dan Roth every so often.
He's like, you need to like use this stuff. And I'm like, I will.
It's not in my addiction cycle yet. Yeah, I'm busy deleting all my tweets right now on X for people to know.
It's very hard to do. We can talk about it a little bit.
And then I will go off of it completely. Are you going to leave your account? I am.
I'm going to let them take it over. Good for you.
I know. I get it.
But that last Terms of Service thing just got me. We'll talk about that in a second.
I am. And I'll be excited to see who Kara Swisher is.
Probably will eat on Twitter. This is my big worry.
So I've got Reckless, which is they want it, and I don't want them to have it. Oh, really?

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, there have been lots of attempts to buy that for me over the years.

Yeah.

And then I have the Verge accounts to manage.

Right.

And I think it's actually pretty dangerous for someone to get to impersonate our publication.

So we're going to keep posting.

I don't care.

But this is like I'm in it, right?

Yeah.

Either answer I think is appropriate.

I use – I like threads.

Threads, I have to say, is good for referrals as a marketing device compared to Blue Sky. The only thing over at X now I get sort of cursed at by right-wing trolls.
And over on both threads and Blue Sky, also I get chastised by left-wing people. Like a lot.
Like, why did you post this? What is this? Or they don't have any context of what I'm saying or the history of anything I've done. And so it's a lot of lectures, which is irritating.
Anyway, I want to talk about the news sites in a minute, but let's first talk about X and the experience. Donald Trump's win clearly was a trigger for many users to leave the platform.
But Alexa, your team at the Journal did an experiment to show how X users are being fed political content, whether they liked it or not. And this is not a surprise because everything at this point, every accusation he makes is a confession as far as I'm concerned.
You also reported on how he was manipulating the algorithm so people could see his tweets. This is something that's also earlier reported.
Talk about how much of a role that's played because, you know, he had talked about Twitter being used in the Twitter files as being manipulated, but it wasn't compared to what they're doing now. Yeah, I mean, I think anyone using the platform kind of like had this impression like, whoa, like what I'm seeing on my ForEU feed feels really different than two years ago.
But we wanted to do our best to measure it. And yeah, we set up these test accounts that did not show any interest in politics.
And they just got blanketed with political posts. And a lot of that content was right-leaning.
How much of a difference it makes in terms of the election, I don't know. But clearly people are not happy, or a lot of people are not happy with, like, what they're seeing on the site.
And that's why they're looking for, like, threads in blue sky. I mean, conservative users are happy.
So the thumb is on the scale. Obviously, Elon did it himself long before that.
He wanted people to look at him, look at me, mom. I mean, he should.
He paid a lot of money for it. And so if he wants people to look at him, it's fine by me.
It's just grotesque and strange and insecure. But it's a lot of looking at him, but then he shifted it over to the right.
Correct? So, you know, we couldn't tell exactly why this was happening. Obviously, I would love to know.
But you're totally right. There has been previous reporting.
I've reported on that about how Elon put the thumb on the scale for his own tweets. So that obviously raises questions about what's happening behind the scenes.
Right, which we know about a little bit. Now, there are other reasons this was starting to happen before the election.
For example, Musk changing terms of service. Neel, I talk about what's going on there.
I mean, terms of service is something we all sign away our lives, but in this case, it's particularly pernicious. Yeah, I mean, he wants to use all the data on X for training Grok.
Which is his AI service. Every company is going through this moment where they're kind of leading their users to make sure that they have the rights to do the appropriate training.
And then Musk, in particular, took that opportunity to move disputes to Texas, where he's going to get a favorable judge, a favorable court. There's a lot of consternation in the legal world about the judges in Texas right now.
If you are paying attention to that side of the house, which no one should, there was just a kerfuffle at the Federalist Society conference where a Texas judge yelled at a legal professor about criticizing forum shopping in Texas. It's a whole thing.
It's very tiresome. But I think what you're getting is here's a service.
It's going to be completely insulated from any pressure that users might place on it, which is already very low. The amount of pressure you as a user or citizen of the Internet can put on a platform owner is already basically zero.
But he's going to insulate it further. He's going to have a very favorable sort of legal environment.
Brendan Carr at the FCC wants to rein in big tech. He's definitely not going to rein in Elon, who he wants to distribute Starlink.
So he has this favorable legal environment, and then he's making it more favorable with his terms of service changes, which will then also feed into Grok. And that is just a big mix of things that most people are going to hit I agree on and not pay any attention to.
But it is actually all – it all just ladders into a pretty pernicious set of results. Right, right.
They usually do things for their advantage, but not quite this personal advantage. Now, I decided to download my entire archive of posts, and it was, I don't know, 170,000 tweets and replies, and it's still going on.
It's still taking forever because of the services. Now, one specific change to the term of services, Neil, I says is, as of November 15th, last week, all lawsuits against S must be filed in the district.
If you're using the service, must be filed in the district court in the Northern District of Texas. Before someone jumps up and says, but Elon moved the headquarters to Texas, and that's why, please sit down.
X is headquartered in Bastrop, 30 miles east of Austin, which is the Western District. Mike, you're from Fort Worth, which is the Northern District.
That's right. Explain what he's done here and what does that precisely mean for users? I mean, I think, well, it's funny.
And Alexa, you may know more about this than I, but I just, I think a lot of his trickery around where the company's headquartered, where he wants to move has been a mix of personal as well as like professional sort of jujitsu. You know, there's the, his sort of reactions to California politics and sort of transgender issues here have really set him off.
And like immediately sort of, he decided to like pick up and move to Texas. But also I think that's mixed with, you know.
Tax. Yeah, the tax burdens that he has.
To what Neil and I was saying, just sort of like the idea that where am I going to get the best judges?

Where am I going to get to bring people to maybe arbitration if that's where he can sort of move lawsuits?

And Tex just like, as far as I can tell at this point, really loves Musk in a way that California doesn't seem to as much, or at least he has a mixed bag in California courts. And look, I will say, to be fair, if you go to look at Facebook or OpenAI or Google on docs, they are asking people to let them use your data to train their stuff too, right? So that's the sort of macro environment that we're in.
But I think you guys are right in that X is going a bit further with you have very little recourse. And if you want to bring any sort of challenge to us, we're going to do that in a way that stacks the deck for us.
If you're Sarah Silverman or the New York Times or whoever, and you want to sue X for copyright infringement over training data, you're going to end up in Texas. And that's just a big deal, right? Because those suits are ongoing.
They're all over the country. And what you're going to engineer is like a circuit split, right? You're going to get a court in Texas saying Elon Musk can do whatever he wants and a court in California saying Hollywood has a point here.
And that's going to land in the Supreme Court very quickly. Alexa, talk about what this means for people.
You know, we actually asked X about this, my colleague and I, and they said like, oh, you can still opt out. I mean, I think like they're rolling out the terms of service now.
So like kind of we'll see how that works in practice. Every company wants like data to train these days.
I thought it was really interesting that Blue Sky said it will never use people's data to train AI. And it's just one of the ways they're trying to distinguish themselves.
Okay, we'll talk about that. Yeah, yeah.
What do you think? Well, so this is fascinating, right? Because Blue Sky is distributed. It's decentralized.
You can just read the entire firehose via API. So Blue Sky is a corporate entity.
It's 20 people. It doesn't make any money.
So right now they have no incentives to do that. But every AI company is saying, well, the open web is free game.
Oh, interesting. Right? Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of AI at Microsoft, is on the record saying, well, if it's on the web, yeah, that's the deal.
And so there's – you can – the Blue Sky folks can say that. And maybe Blue Sky itself will never do the training.
But it is sort of like the architecture of that system allows other people to do it. And there's no reason that another Blue Sky-associated thing couldn't do it.
And I think we just have to pay attention to that over time. Exactly.
So let's talk about those two social media sites that have been the biggest pickups since the election, Threads and Blue Sky. Let's compare the numbers quickly.
Blue Sky has just topped 20 million users this week. It keeps going up.
Everyone's all excited on the site. But those are not active users.
Meanwhile, Threads has 15 million signups in November alone, even before the election.

Threads had 275 million active monthly users. Now, they've been, Adam Aseri, who runs it, has been beefing about what, because everyone's like, Blue Sky's better and more used on a daily basis.
Mike, people call this Dave and Goliath. Talk about this.
I think it's a little more complex than that. Yeah, for sure.
I think, look, there's momentum around Blue Sky. Look, adding a million people a day is no slouch, and I think that that's worthy of celebrating if you want to celebrate that.
But I do think the scale of Facebook and threads and everything that's sort of incorporated there has to be sort of appreciated. Facebook also has a ton more levers that they can do to juice growth.
Like it's Blue Skies, basically organic growth of like going and downloading the app or signing up on the web with threads. It's the little hooks are inside of Instagram or in Facebook and like they can just sort of nudge you either to sign up or to come back.
And Facebook has always had a real advantage there just in leveraging their existing properties to do the next thing, you know. Right.
Which Microsoft got in trouble for. Yeah, right.
No, exactly. This is just like very much a big company playbook there.
I think the issue for both of these companies is like what online culture looks like for them, you know, and like what platforms kind of are defined by over time. And they have different approaches to that, each of them.
Blue Sky seems to be like leaning into, you can customize all this yourself and you can like have control of the experience. And I'm always curious how much the average person wants that.
Does that. You know? Yeah, like sort of like someone modding their Android phone or something versus like someone getting an Apple phone and just saying, I want it to all kind of work for me and not have to dig into the weeds a lot.
So Alexa, roughly speaking, you see migrating to these platforms. It's celebrities, influencers, liberals, journalists, creatives.
How are you seeing it? And are they just window shopping? And we'll see those numbers dropping again. We have seen celebrities.
I mean, yeah, just anecdotally, you know, the number of people who actually quit X is smaller than the number of people who are opening accounts on these other platforms. And so you always got to wonder when someone says they're leaving X, like, are they actually leaving? Journalists is a really interesting community because we saw a lot of tech journalists on threads, but there's been a lot of questions about how does meta-moderating news content.
And so maybe, like, is Blue Sky going to be the hot place for that now? And what about others, influencers? You know, there was Black Twitter. There's other things that are happening there.
A lot of people have noticed, like, you know, liberal commentators, liberal activists. Like, Blue Sky is, like, clearly the home for that.
Yeah, it's the hip Brooklyn bar. It's the hip Brooklyn bar.
Yeah. My wife called Threads, what are you doing over at the Cheesecake Factory? And I said, I like the Cheesecake Factory, I'm sorry to tell you.
That's something for everybody. Yeah, it's very good cheesecake.
Well, yeah. If you're tired of hearing about the election, like, I don't think I can recommend Blue Sky to you.
If you don't want to hear about Trump for the next four years, at least right now, I mean, maybe, you know, maybe if you can go to the efforts, like, those custom feeds and stuff, threads is more normal, maybe. It's like they want fashion influencers.
They want food influencers. They don't want like journalists talking about Trump.
Yeah. What about, Nila, are they window shopping? You and I have been through so many rounds of these social media networks and obviously Meta's dominated almost the entire time since it really got going.
Is it just window shopping or how? Because people have been desperately looking for anything but Elon for a while. And there's been several posts.
There's been, like, everyone's trying to find something. And they're desperate because they have such an addiction to the medium, essentially, especially Twitter.
The heyday of Twitter is this fascinating moment in history. I think hundreds, if not thousands, of PhD people will write their dissertations on that

moment in history when there was a direct line to expertise from a number of fields,

and they all just sort of collided.

And then there was a massive backlash to expertise being expressed in that way.

Then Elon was like, what if you all went away?

What if I just turned down the knob on whatever you said and whatever I said appeared to be right? And I think what you see on Blue Sky right now is all of that community is headed to that platform, right? Because on Threads, like, if you're a public health expert, Threads wants nothing to do with you, right? It's just not interested in you. If you're a tech journalist, you're like, I really want to talk about anything other than federation, which Threads, when I post about federated social media, the Threads algorithm is like, yep, that's what we're here for.
But almost anything else kind of goes away. There's a lot of that happening, right? If you're an economist, Threads wants nothing to do with you.
So you see all the experts are sort of migrating to Blue Sky where they're just rebuilding their communities. Like, InfoSec Twitter is moving to Blue Sky.
And I think that, for whatever it's worth, is creating this, like, liberal bubble, right? Because the experts of the right are being lauded on X. Right.
That's their bubble. That's their bubble.
That's their bubble. And you see the other group of experts is moving to Blue Sky.
Whether or not that can recreate whatever Twitter was where, like, a bunch of other people showed up to hang out with those experts and call them names, I don't know. But there's a whole set of, like, other groups that are sort of in the middle, right? If I open X, the only thing I'm really looking for right now is a bunch of, like, NFL beat reporters because they haven't moved yet.
Maybe they're going to move to Blue Sky, and they're going to build a community there, and football fans will go find them there. like we just Right.
Right. Right.
Right. Right.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Right. Right.
Right.. They have different incentives.
It is a lot of lifestyle and fashion.

And that's pretty much what Meta has always said they want out of threads. You can do politics here.
But really what we want is, you know, someone showing up and being like, do you like my dress? And they're getting it. Like they're getting the thing they want.
They're good at it. And it's always very engagement-baity in that specific way because that's what the algorithm rewards.
But I think it's okay to have a creator platform and then another platform that rewards news and politics and expertise.

Right, that are different.

And it's basically a bunch of trade publications, right? Right, right. And I think that's fine.
We'll be back in a minute. Today Explained here with Eric Levitt, senior correspondent at Vox.com, to talk about the 2024 election.
That can't be right. Eric, I thought we were done with that.
I feel like I'm Pacino in three. Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.
Why are we talking about the 2024 election again? The reason why we're still looking back is that it takes a while after an election to get all of the most high quality data on what exactly happened. So the full picture is starting to just come into view now.
And you wrote a piece about the full picture for Vox recently, and it did bonkers business on the Internet. What did it say? What struck a chord? Yeah, so this was my interview with David Shore of Blue Rose Research.
He's one of the biggest sort of democratic data gurus in the party. And basically, the big picture headline takeaways are...
On Today Explained. You'll have to go listen to them there.
Find the show wherever you listen to shows, bro. So, Neela, you talked about this fediverse that you just talked about.
This is federated media you're talking about. For those who don't know, explain what it means and talk about the difference between X and so-called decentralized social networks.
It's protocols, not platforms necessarily. Yeah, that's the very famous Mike Masnick paper, protocols, not platforms, that Jack Dorsey read, and then he started the Blue Sky project to build a protocol.
He hired Jay Graber to do it, and then she very smartly said, I can't do this inside of Twitter. You have to make me my own company.
So there's two competitor decentralized protocols. And yeah, it's like a little bit of VHS and beta.
But the idea fundamentally is that you as a user should be able to own your content, post wherever you want, and then anyone else should be able to find you the way that email works. Right? You sign up for Gmail, people on Microsoft Mail can find you.
People on Apple Mail can find you. That is not true right now with social networks.
You sign up for Twitter, you're on Twitter, there's a wall. It's very hard to find that content off of Twitter.
It's impossible to engage with that content off of Twitter. Same with Meta, same with TikTok, whatever.
The core idea is we should all be able to publish and receive engagement freely the way that we can do with email. And then what's the experience difference? Because most people don't want to make their own butter, Neelai.
They don't. And the user differences right now are super minimal because none of these platforms have completed the project, right? So if you truly want to experience federated social media, your answer right now is Mastodon, which has done it.
That's like saying, if you really want to experience computers, you have to run Linux. Right.
Great. Most people are not going to do that.
So Threads is approaching it very interestingly. They're taking one federated feature and rolling it out to the whole user base at once.
So Fediverse sharing is on. So now other people on Mastodon can see your Thread stuff.
Everybody gets that at once, but you can't see what people are liking or replying to you. Then they're going to add likes, and you can see who liked your stuff, but you can't reply to them.
So it's one feature at a time at scale, which is a really interesting way to build anything. Blue Sky and the app protocol hasn't really rolled it out at all.
Like, there's no other Blue Sky app yet. Right.
Right? Like, the promise of federation there, they're sort of rolling out big chunks at a time. So it could be different, but it sounds, I mean, exhausting.
Right. So right now, Blue Sky is a very centralized service.
Like, you can have your own data, you can publish your own data. There's things that are federated about it, and people are building that stuff, and it's really interesting.
But you're downloading the Blue Sky app from Blue Sky, and for the most part, most people are publishing to their own server. Got it.
So tastes like chicken, essentially. Yeah.
So every week we get a question from an outside expert. This week, the question is from someone who's had his fair share of run-ins on X, former CNN anchor Don Lemon.
He's also in a lawsuit with Elon Musk, which is why he came off of Twitter, because he was nervous about it getting moved to the new venue he's been suing him in California. Let's listen.
X, formerly Twitter, has long been dominated by major figures like Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Matt Gaetz, and Tulsi Gabbard, who especially right now garner worldwide media exposure. Despite the reported exodus and concerns over toxicity, can platforms like Blue Sky and Threads compete, or will they end up like MySpace, overtaken by X's global reach and its broad appeal to many journalists like yourselves? Will users return to X's drama

even after leaving on principle?

Neil, I'll start with you then, Alex, then Mike, very quickly.

I'm just blown away by the news anchor voice.

I know. Do you like that?

I can't.

Don Lemon. I know.
They sent that to me last night.

I love it.

Because I was going to go, very good, Don Lemon. That is a skill.
I got to work harder on that. Yeah.
You're never going to make it. Yeah, it's not going to happen.
I guess I fundamentally reject the premise of that question, not in a malicious way or a bad way. X and Twitter were tiny, right? And criticism of the current X management is in no way praise for the previous Twitter management.

Right, right.

This was a disaster of a company through and through.

They never made any money.

Never.

They never got over 375 million users, I think, at the peak.

Maybe it was 325 with some amount of bots in it.

Like, this was a tiny platform that carried vastly oversized influence precisely because a bunch of experts and elites chose to use it. Regular people consumed tweets through cable news or screenshots on TikTok or something else.
Or Facebook on Facebook. Right? There was just something else happening where the content from that platform migrated to the bigger platforms that were much better run and had much wider reach.
And yet, sometimes you created a main character on Twitter and that would break through. But actually, much more rarely than people think.
Those people are already famous. So I just think if all the experts are posting on Blue Sky, if Flavor Flav, who is the lead celebrity evangelist of Blue Sky right now, recruits even more musicians on the Blue Sky, we're just going to see their posts.
I don't think the media ecosystem really cares about the platform at the source. I think they care about those people.
It's just where they are. Alexa? I've been thinking a lot these days about fragmentation.
And it just feels like, okay, sure, Twitter was never the biggest social media platform, but I do think it was the primary driver of like a lot of the media narrative. And I'm just not sure we're going to see like any site replace that.
It feels like, you know, we're all kind of moving to our more insular kind of different communities online. And the platforms all tell you all the actions and group chats.
It's not on the public part of the platforms. It's all in the DMs.
Like on Signal and WhatsApp. Mike? Yeah, no, it's funny.
I was, so I'm home in Texas for a bit and I was out with a buddy last night and I think he uses the time with a New York Times reporter to tell me all the things I'm doing wrong or how legacy media is wrong, which is very useful. That's what the point of being friends with the New York Times reporter.
That is exactly it. But he just sort of doubled down on the point.
He's like, look, I spend my whole day in Discord and in different WhatsApp groups. These are where my friend groups are talking and where I'm primarily getting a lot of my news.
And I agree with both of you. Twitter punched above its weight for a long time and was highly influential and all of that.
They never really gathered all of the value for themselves as a company for that because it trickled out elsewhere. I think people vote with their feet on where they feel they're getting the most value.
And to me, it doesn't exist for Twitter in the same way that it did before. Maybe the folks who are happy with Elon's shifts stick around there and feel like they have a space there, but I'm skeptical because a lot of the user experience just feels less interesting to me now.
Which is what he talked about when he first bought it. If you don't feel good after an hour on this site, you should leave, which I did, which is interesting.
But he feels great. He does.
He feels amazing. Does he? To whatever extent, he can truly feel happy.
I think he's manufactured as much of it as he does. He feels amazing.
Does he? Does he? Or is it just? To whatever extent, he can truly feel happiness. Right.
Yeah. I think he's manufactured as much of it as he can.
Yeah. Let me quote Wicked.
There's a line where Elphaba looks at the prince and says, that's why you're so unhappy. He's, you know, he's dancing through life, but in fact, he's not.
And Elon is dancing badly through life. He's a bad dancer.
Sorry. That is fact.
That is fact. I'm shocked.
Even if you don't like Elon. Wait, can I say something just in response to your thought, Mike? And I think about this all the time because you two are reporters and you're very good reporters.
My background is like product reviewer, right? And the history of product reviews is you can hype up the product all you want and then people get it and they experience it and the truth outs every time. The products work or they don't.
They're good or they're bad, and you can just be evaluative of that. And I think, yeah, people are going to go into their bubbles.
They're going to go into their discords. They're going to go into the DMs.
But at some point, they're going to experience the public side of the platforms as well. And regular people can just evaluate.
I open Twitter, and I look at this feed, and it's just these people screaming that this woman should not go to the bathroom. And this is stupid, right? And the truth outs like very consistently, especially with tech products, people are like, yeah, I'm over this.
Like I can just click a different button on my phone. And I'm curious to see how that specifically plays out because this was not like an overwhelming mandate of an election.

Like a lot of people are pissed about the outcome of this election. No, it's very close.
And they might just do something else, right? They might just choose to have different experiences. Well, one of the things is my sons use Reddit.
My sons use WhatsApp. They use Snapchat.
So I think what Alexa is saying about fragmentation is absolutely, they do not use those things. So I want to do that role of politics you just mentioned and misinformation is played.
One of the things is the moderation things. Now, Alexi, Nila, and you have also been talking about that.
Content moderation is moving away from content moderation. They set up disinformation teams.
Those have mostly disappeared. Neela, as you know, you've been following this a long time.
What has happened here? Alexa, first, you've been reporting on Twitter since the last election. Talk about the content.
They've just given up, correct? And then Neela, I follow. I mean, you know, let's just start with X says they are, you know, promoting free speech.
But But yes, there is this backlash to when Twitter was back-checking Donald Trump. These platforms kicked Donald Trump off.
It seems crazy to think about now how much has changed. And there's an easing up.
These platforms did not have a good experience wading into these moderation debates, basically.

Like, people on all sides got mad.

So, yeah, you know, Elon came in and he said, like, I want to do the bare minimum, basically, to moderate.

And that's where they, and they all followed.

Neelai?

I have a different and probably vastly more cynical view of this.

They are all still moderating, right?

There's a bunch of stuff they have to do. You have to kick child sexual abuse material off your platforms.
Everyone I know who works in trust and safety, they're still spending a lot of time on this very pernicious, devastating problem. They all have huge problems coming with AI, right? If you show an average user just a feed of AI slop, maybe that's your dream.
Like, maybe that's Mark Zuckerberg's dream is that he can make AI based advertising and show it to a million people. But the tools aren't there yet.
So, they're having to moderate an incoming firehose of just garbage that they're all getting. So it's garbage over things that are pernicious.
Right. They're spending a bunch of time still moderating a bunch of – the copyright law is the only real law on the internet.

Like if you want somebody real law on the internet.

Like if you want somebody taken down on the internet, you say it's a copyright violation and then it comes off the internet. That's what happened to the Sandy Hook parents.
Right. And so there's all these ways – all these things they still have to do and they still have to invest in it.
And even X still has to invest in a bunch of them. What they're out of is the idea that anyone has to be polite or that they will run a company whose internal values

are expressed in the product they show to people.

So, you know, Facebook has internal values, right?

You can't just, like, show up to Facebook and just be racist.

Like, they will just fire you.

That will happen.

You can show up on Facebook and be racist.

That's weird.

Like, there are very few companies where your internal values are such an

I'm not going to is because it allows users to choose their own moderation. It creates a market for moderation.
Meaning they can have a very racist feed or a very this feed. If that's what you want.
They have been kicking out much more. They don't mind kicking people off at Blue Sky.
They don't mind kicking people. I think Andrew Tate came on and off.
Right, because they have this out, right, where they can say, look, set up your own server.

Go do it. You can interoperate with us.
And I think that is an incredible exit ramp

for anyone to say, look,

the free market will solve this problem because

we are interoperable. And so we're going to

have our values and the internal values of our company

will match the external values of our product.

Which is the selling point.

And then if you don't like it, set up

another, build your own. Get out of

our bar. Get out of our bar, essentially.

So Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and threads

Thank you. Which is the selling point of Blue Sky.
And then if you don't like it, set up another. Build your own.
Get out of our bar. Get out of our bar, essentially.
So Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads, four major social media platforms are owned by Meta. Mark Zuckerberg, Mike, you've reported so long on him, but how he started de-emphasizing political content around the 2020 election and doubled down this year.
Talk about what's going on behind the scenes and what that looked like for users. Mark wrote a letter to Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee in August, about the election and said, my goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or other, or even appear to be playing a role.
It's such a pretzel he's doing there. Do you think he's sticking that mantra? And how does that impact? Where is he right now, besides singing with T-Pain.
T-Pain. I cannot discuss this at this point.
I kind of like it, but I hate it. So it's really a difficult situation.
I think as a 40-year-old dad, I'm like, what if I pay T-Pain to hang out with me? Yeah, right, right. Okay.
Oh, ow. I don't think I can afford that.
That's pretty good. Don't do it.
Don't post it, for fuck's sake. I know, right? Yeah.
I think there, okay, so yeah, his sort of political evolution personally has been very fascinating, but I think he got really cynical after going through 2016 to 2024. I think there were some company covering efforts to rein in moderation on Facebook to seek out disinfo.

That definitely, from a corporate standpoint, they had to do it or else they were going to get regulated into oblivion.

And they still did anyway, but they did enough there.

I also think there was a point at which Mark was like, yes, I have an obligation to deal with some of this stuff.

And if I just go to Washington and – because you know, Kara, like he used to just send Cheryl there all the time. Like she was the face in Washington for a long time.
Then he was like, all right, I'm going to go. I'm going to appear at seven different Capitol Hill hearings, explain my point of view.
Regulators will get it, and then everything will be great. Obviously, that never happened.
And he just became even more of a target from certain figures on the right, like Josh Hawley,

sort of rose, like attacking him specifically. And there was a point where he was like, why am I still doing this? Why am I engaging in good faith in Washington, spending tens of billions of dollars on moderation or whatever to only get continually beat up.
And so I think he was like, yes, I'm going to have my army of lobbyists still dealing with Washington. I have all these people sort of go in and march and do the stuff.
I have Nick Clegg, who is now basically our ambassador to the world, you know, so I don't have to deal with this. And then, you know then try to excise or at least reduce as much politics

on our platforms as I can

because it's just more of a headache to me

than it's worth.

Although Trump had threatened him with prison.

He still tends to.

Elon is sitting right next to him

in some of these calls

with Google and everybody else.

They're under threat.

He's not out of the line of fire.

Also, can I just point out he only responds to threats from the right wing? Yeah. Right.
That's a good point. That's a great point.
It's not that he made it neutral and the conservatives went away. It's that the conservatives are in power and now they don't give a shit.
Right. And that and there's no counterbalancing force there.
And I don't think there should be. Right.
Right. Like really what we're talking about is like what platform will have the the users we're also talking about? Is there a First Amendment in America? Should the government haul the distributors of speech in front of panels and yell at them about not distributing their tweets? No.
And I honestly think one of the mistakes that all of these CEOs made, Sundar, Jack, Mark, they forgot to talk about the First Amendment. They did not assert their own rights in front of Congress as loudly as they should have.
They just apologized. They just whisked out because they want other tax breaks.
They want other shit. They want subsidies on NVIDIA, whatever they want, right? But they forgot to say, actually, you know what we are is major distributors of American speech with our own rights.
Right, that's right. And if this conversation is inappropriate, and we're past that, like we're in a very dangerous place for the First Amendment right now because all of the people in charge of the Trump administration are kind of like, what if you did what we said instead? We'll be back in a minute.
So let's look in the future. We're going to finish up talking about that.
We talked about how President-elect Trump has tapped Commissioner Brendan Carr to run the FCC. Trump hailed him as a warrior for free speech.
But there are concerns that he wants to be a speech police. I would agree with this.
He has argued that users should be able to personalize content filters, but it's clear he's mostly concerned with the censorship of conservative voices. He's Elon's best friend, as we noted on Twitter.
What impact do you think he will have on content moderation, Alexa, briefly, and then each of you? I mean, you know, from what I understand, there's like a lot of questions about what he could actually do in his role. You know, what can that...
Yeah, he doesn't have the biggest job, right? He doesn't have to have too many rights, right? So what are the actual, like, regulatory powers? One thing I've been thinking about, though, is a point I wanted to make just in terms of, like, the influence of X in the Trump administration. I think it's still going to be a really important platform.
I don't think it's going to be a platform, like, we can ignore for the next four years. Maybe if you're an average user, sure, you can go on Blue Sky and forget about it, but not journalists.
It's the biggest platform that the president-elect is using, a huge influence still. And he's sitting right next to him.
Go ahead, Nila and Carr. Brendan Carr is a wannabe and has been a wannabe for a long time.
He's like a verge reader. We've profiled him before.
He's just been floating around our ecosystem for a long time. He has.
He wrote the Project 2025 chapter on what the FCC should do. I would just note, most of Project 2025, you read it, you're like, what's the chapter in the Department of Education? It's like, get rid of it.
The chapter in the FCC is very long, and it's Brendan Carr saying, I should have more power in all of these ways. It's strikingly different than the other chapters in that specific way.
And a lot of it is legally tenuous. Like, it's inconsistent with, like, Supreme Court decisions from a very conservative Supreme Court.
Like, the Supreme Court does not want a bunch of government agencies to have a lot of power. And in fact, they just released a ruling in, like, Loper Bright that got rid of Chevron.
Like, they're basically saying the courts can override the agencies. That is the big Supreme Court ruling.
It is undoing the administrative state. At that same Federalist Society conference, they did a champagne toast about that ruling that they destroyed the administrative state.
Brennan Carr in Project 2025 is like, I will issue a ruling from the FCC reinterpreting Section 230 to get rid of some judicial president I don't like so I can moderate the platforms. Right.
What are you talking about? No, he's not going to get it. But do you know who hates this idea? It's Clarence Thomas.
Right. You're going to roll right into your own conservative movement in a way that makes no sense.
But what he will get to do along the way is fulminate about taking 230 away, fulminate about who has access. Starlink is a giant ISP for rural America, right? He wants to deploy that more broadly.
There's no net neutrality because the Republicans took that away. Now Elon gets to turn the scales of what platforms hit your data caps, what don't, what videos load faster or buffer or higher quality.
That's a lot of games you can play even without the formal power or in Brennan Card's case, a consistent, logical, intellectual position. Okay, Mike, very briefly.
Sorry, I want to make it very clear how I feel about Brennan Card. I was going to say, just spare no.
I will tell you he's super friendly. He's very polite.
Is he? I was going to say in person. He's a hey girl kind of guy.
It's a very, I love meeting people who are one person on Twitter and then a very different person in real life. Very much so.
That's funny. No, no, it, you know, I keep thinking back to, do you all remember trending topics gate on Facebook years ago? Oh God.
Where all of this just sort of goes back to this moment where there was a, what I think was a faulty story published about like censoring right-wing people on Facebook. It sort of got dismantled.
People saw it as kind of flawed. But out of that, I think a lot of folks on the right sort of realized the power of using this cudgel to say, we are being silenced on here and have never really stopped doing that.
And no matter how prominent they are, and to your point earlier, the CEOs of these companies are very attuned to those complaints all the time and tend to react more to them than to folks on the left. And so, who knows if he's going to have any more power or get what he's asking for.
He's definitely going to make himself a nuisance. Right.
But I think that's going to be the bugbear. And I'm just, I'm not looking forward to it because you don't really have good faith conversations about a lot of the time.
I just briefly wanted to kind of add on my answer to you in terms of influence. I think I said like, X is the biggest platform the president-elect is using.
Again, you know, Trump is on TikTok. Trump is on Facebook.
Yes, those are bigger, but bigger in terms of driving the media narrative. So yeah, same, punching above its weight.
Trump is native to Twitter and truth. He is not native to TikTok.
He's a born poster on Twitter too. He knows how to post.
I wrote a whole New York Times column. He said the world's greatest Twitter troll.
I think it was Tucker Carlson made the campaign documentary that he published. And there's just a scene.
I don't recommend watching that. But there's a scene in it where Trump is sitting next to a laptop, a woman using a laptop, composing a tweet.
Yeah. And it is.
I feel like all of us should just watch that. That's incredible.
This is how the government works now. It's just a man looking at someone typing and saying tweets.
It's wild. Well, he's good at it, let's be honest.
I agree. All right, last couple of questions.
There's a bottom line. Right now, X is one of the biggest social sites, but also huge money pits.
It's not one of the biggest, actually. The other is bigger.
I don't think he cares. He's rich.
This is like his toxic yacht that he sails from harbor to harbor and spews venom. The truth is the group of banks lent him $13 billion, and they still have those loans on their books.
His friends gave him money. He's lost them all this kind of money.
They hope to get it back at SpaceX, et cetera. He's hired a new chief financial officer.
Alexa, does it matter? Does it matter that they're losing money? And then separately, Mike and Eli threads his own by Meta has bags of money. It's going to start doing advertising soon.
Blue Sky, of course, is a startup and has to scrounge for cash. And Blue Sky CEO Jay Graber has talked about how the site is billionaire proof.
So she's kind of nonchalant about its future. She said the people will take the seat elsewhere if the site doesn't work.
Each of you, Alexa, talk about the money at Twitter. Mike, you at Meta, and Neela, you at Blue Sky.
Yeah, does it matter? I don't think it matters to Elon and his bigger empire how much money, like, on the margins X is making or not. Obviously, it matters to the people working there, and that's something I hear about a lot in my reporting.
But no, Elon is really like, it's Elon's business empire. Mark Cuban told me this right when he bought his, he's not buying it for anything else, but influence doesn't matter how much money he loses.
And it is continuing to lose money, correct? As far as we know, you know, we don't get a lot of detail about their financial these days. Linda says it's great.
Yeah, Linda says it's great. Linda! Oh, my God.
I forgot about her. Oh, she's so good.
Her posts are amazing. Oh, she's still mad at Kara Swisher.
Anyway, too bad, Linda. I'm shocked.
Walked right into that one. I didn't actually create anything.
She did it herself. Anyway, Mike, what about Meta? They have so much money, and they're going to start advertising.
They could be like Netflix all of a sudden. They're rolling in it.
They're rewarded by Wall Street. It's very funny.
If they were any other company, they probably would be punished for the amount of capex that they're spending on data centers and marks, some would say, fo into the metaverse and like trying to sort of build. Everybody would say that.
I'm trying to be nice. But they just, they're rolling in cash.
And then Wall Street loves that every time they build a new product and can scale it very rapidly, there's potential upside in sticking ads in there and plugging it into their ad servers that run Instagram, Facebook, and to some degree, WhatsApp. They already have so much information on your preferences that they don't have to start from scratch on this new thing.
So I think that he gets a long leash on not being punished for the amount of money that they're spending on other things that may never pay off or at least take very long time to pay off.

And threads for what problems I see in it, I think, could really work in that regard.

I do too.

They're going to put advertising in there and it'll be good.

Totally.

It'll be good.

It's Instagram for text is how I think of it.

What about Blue Sky, the financial prospects, Neelai?

So I interviewed Jay on Decoder earlier this year. I asked her, how do you make money? This is before the explosion.
Maybe she has new ideas now. But a lot of their ideas are really interesting, right? She said, we're going to sell people algorithms.
We're going to allow people to compose lists and sell lists. Well, there's some amount of, like, how should we do paid tweets that everybody has in the back of their mind? Like, this should be a native subscription platform.
So I think their idea is to sell user experience and then to build an ecosystem of basically like B2B SaaS products where other people want to start Blue Sky servers. We'll see how it goes.
They've got a long way to go. I would say Meta is missing a huge opportunity of threads because getting away from live and reverse cron means they can't go attack the market that Twitter had won, which is everyone's tweeting about the Grammys, everyone's tweeting about football, Ford just put your logo here.
Right now, Twitter just – X just launched an NFL hub sponsored by Ford because that's still where people go talk about sports. And Meta is just missing that opportunity, which seems bizarre to me.
Like that's the thing that people want the most is to talk about things that are happening in real time.

And brands want to be near it.

Yeah, they can snatch that from.

Right, and they can just take it tomorrow because they can also do all of the rest of the targeting across their network.

And they've just missed it.

And I think once they wake up and realize, oh, this is what people actually want.

And also, they are feeling, to whatever extent, competitive pressure from Blue Sky.

I think they have an opportunity to make a different kind of money. Meta doesn't make a lot of brand money.
They make a lot of small business direct money. Yes.
This is an opportunity to make brand money, and I think they will wake up to it very quickly. Yeah, I agree.
They'll figure it out. So, last question.
Blue Sky and Threads aren't the only sites that are seeing post-election bumps. The CEO of Spill, a social media site focused on the black community, says it's a 10x over week sign-up.
It's small, obviously. True social has only about 4 million monthly visits and like 60% men, angry, angry men.
But it's still around. So is that the future, these specialized insular bubbles, little echo chambers, and then you worry about other people coming into your echo chamber? You know, life is like that.
Like, real life is like that. Little bars you like, little places, neighborhoods.
And we haven't talked about TikTok, but are we in a new age? And what does that mean for people who are trying to get a larger town square, even though these are not town squares? Each of you. First, let's start with Alexa and then Mike, and we'll finish up with Neelai.
I think we're entering a new era of fragmentation, and I honestly don't know what it means. So I'm curious to hear what you guys think.
But I just, I think like a lot of the conversation has been like, what platform is going to win? Blue Sky Threads X. And I think the answer is more like, you know, we're just like people are finding where they want to be.
Where they want to be. All right, Mike? Yeah, I think that's right.
I think, Kara, when you were saying earlier about your kids using Reddit a lot, like Reddit kind of for me is a model of this just because of how strong and tight-knit very specific communities are on there and each one kind of develops their own culture. Its stock is going well right now.
Yeah, I'm shocked, honestly, that they did this well just because of how much of a mess that company was in its earlier for most of its life. But like Reddit and Twitter kind of function or historic Twitter kind of function in similar ways in that like you could go real deep on one niche and find your sort of community there.
And like, I think people just kind of your experience with Twitter, Kara, it's like they don't like to be screamed at or told that they're wrong all the time. And like, even if intellectually you can you want to say, like, the marketplace of ideas is good, I should be able to talk to people and have differences.
On some level, you're like, well, I still at the end of the day want to talk to people who kind of agree with me, right, and be around those folks. Or like what I like.
It's my interests, right? That's why Reddit is so appealing, I think. Totally.
So I agree. I think fragmentation is probably going to go even further from here.
Neil, I finish up. I think it's interesting to think about as fragmentation, right? We've all been poisoned by the idea that there should be global-scale platforms where everything happens.
That is just not true. That's, like, not how the media worked until five years ago.
And so I think this is actually just a sort of natural rebalancing. And really, I don't think it's filter bubbles.
I think it's communities. People want their communities.
And communities are pretty disparate, right? Like, the left is not a monolith, like, very clearly. It's always yelling at each other.
That's probably why it can't wield power as effectively as the right, which has epistemic closure, and they all just say the same thing all the fucking time. They're fighting underneath.
You'll see. That's coming, right? He already looks kind of pissed at Elon, so we'll see how it goes.
Oh, I can't wait. I can't wait.
I'm so excited. But there's just an element where I think you used to live in a pretty local media environment.
You had local television and local papers. You would have some exposure to national issues.
For the past however long, it's just like all national all the time. Everyone in the world is going to talk about one thing because the algorithms are like, this is the most engaging thing today.
There's a llama on the loose. You must pay attention to this llama.
That's weird. Like, I think it's fundamentally weird.
And I think an internet that is more local, where people go to more different kinds of things and have more different kinds of experiences, fundamentally healthier for everyone. Yep.
Nature is healing. That's right.
In the weirdest possible way. In the weirdest possible way.
Anyway, thank you all of us. We'll be continuing to follow this.
It's a business story. It's a social story.
It's a sort of sick society story and everything else, and it's a reflection of ourselves, and I really appreciate your thoughtfulness. Thank you.
Thank you. Thanks.
Reunited. Reunited.
And it feels so good. It feels so good.
Got any plans for Tuesday, December 3rd? I hope you'll join me at a special live recording of this very podcast on with Kara Swisher, presented by Elf Cosmetics. To be CEO Anjali Soot and I will be tackling gender disparity in the boardroom and exploring how companies with women in the C-suite have better business outcomes.
I'm really looking forward to this discussion on equality and so much more, including what's happening in the streaming space. And I don't want you to miss it.
For tickets, visit voxmediaevents.com slash elf. That's voxmediaevents.com slash elf.
I hope to see you there. On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castor-Russell, Kateri Yoakum, Jolie Myers, Megan Burney, and Kaylin Lynch.
Nishat Kirwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio. Special thanks to Kate Furby.
Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Arruda. And our theme music is by Trackademics.
If you're already following the show, you can also follow us on Instagram and TikTok. I'm hanging out on Threads and Blue Sky.
It's a lot, but don't go over to X at all. Please

don't. If not, there's a llama on the loose.
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search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher

from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with

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