Who's afraid of an echo chamber?

The immediate aftermath of the 2024 US presidential election has left a lot of folks who exist anywhere left of center feeling unmoored, not sure of what to do next or whom to blame, as we all wait to see what a second Trump term ends up looking like. (The safe bet is "chaotic.") But for many of us there was something concrete we could do: We could get rid of Twitter (aka "the X Dot Com Platform"). Multibillionaire and contender for worst poster ever Elon Musk has turned the social media site/app into an endless fountain of reactionary right-wing hate and an enormous monument to his own self-regard. Musk turning the app into a de facto arm of the Trump campaign proved to be the last straw for many remaining Twitter denizens.

The post-Twitter app of choice increasingly seems to be the still semi-obscure Bluesky, which Garbage Day's Ryan Broderick – who knows way more about this shit than I do – described as "the next Twitter." (Broderick's piece is worth reading for its wider rumination on how Bluesky's true competition isn't Twitter, per se, but, rather, the slowly dying idea of a text-based internet.)

If you haven't been on Bluesky, it offers a rough approximation of 2015 Twitter, except it has no algorithm and safety tools that work almost a little too well. The site's blocking feature completely stops trolls in their tracks, all but nuking them from orbit. It also allows you to remove one of your "skeets" from a post quoting it. Users have also assembled lists that can collect people you might want to follow, like TV critics or Minnesota Vikings fans or, I don't know, crocheters. But those lists can also be used to block lots of people you might not want in your mentions en masse, like, say, Trump devotees or TERFs or people who wish death on songbirds. These block lists are powerful, useful tools. I do feel a touch nervous about how easy they can be manipulated to add voices who might not belong on said lists, but that feels like a conversation already being hashed out on the app.

More significantly, many of Bluesky's early power users have built an understood culture at the site that one should block trolls and move on, rather than engaging. Those ideals have largely led to a Bluesky that values friendly conversation and aggressive, preemptive defense moves over a more aggressive social media experience. (Here's some more cool stuff about Bluesky and how so much of its culture stems from early adoption by trans people from my old pals at Vox.)

Bluesky brings the fun, weird vibes of old Twitter back to life

As more users flee X, a clearer, sunnier social media age is dawning.

VoxAdam Clark Estes

If you read the above two paragraphs, then you can surely guess what the most common complaint has been about Bluesky: It's an echo chamber. Here are some articles discussing that very thing, from a variety of perspectives. In all of this hand-wringing however, too few people have asked the most important question of all: Does it matter? Yes, if you are a journalist, then when presenting an accurate portrait of something you're covering, you should absolutely look outside of your immediate circles, and, as such, you should probably look away from your social media platform of choice. But if I'm just going on an app to have a nice time, why should I have to listen to people shout crude bile at each other?

My feelings on this have been shaped by two different elements of my personal life. The first is the most obvious: I'm a trans woman, and my experience of harassment on social media changed drastically the second I came out. Before I transitioned, I certainly believed online harassment was horrifying and real – most of my good friends were women who wrote for the internet, after all – but I do wonder if somewhere in the back of my brain, I thought it was manageable, something one could bear with a good support system and regular therapy. Transitioning almost immediately disabused me of that notion. Suddenly, my general feeling of "Well, I need to let everybody have their say, right?" shifted to, "I don't think I should have to listen to people call me a man as the cost of being online."

But the other thing that has shaped my feelings has proved far more powerful: I grew up in an echo chamber from the right, and for the most part, American media simply doesn't care about this problem or describes it via high-minded, academic terms like "epistemic closure." (Though it has the same initials as "echo chamber," it doesn't have the same immediacy, does it?)

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Growing up evangelical Christian in a small town in South Dakota, I had dramatically little interaction with people who weren't immediately like me. I grew up in the 1990s, so it was very hard to shut the world at large out, even in small-town South Dakota. We only had so many options for entertainment, so I was exposed to the wider world via television and movies and magazines. But even then, an entire alternate media ecosystem was building to allow parents to completely inculcate their children from anything that wasn't "godly." That media ecosystem is all-pervasive now if you are anywhere on the right, and you need never leave it if you don't want to.

Yet we do not tend to talk about this as an echo chamber or a bubble because for the most part, arguments about echo chambers are being driven by a highly-educated media class that has rarely, if ever, met someone from that world. Even those of us who did grow up there and go on to move in more highly-educated circles – like me or J.D. Vance, my dark mirror twin – tend to learn to speak in the terms of the world we find ourselves in, not the ones we left behind. Thus, this echo chamber – which is much, much larger than any lefty echo chamber could ever hope to be – is largely written about as a curiosity that exists in an America that is simultaneously the one these pundits inhabit and also not.

I know more than a handful of trans people back in South Dakota who are not sure where they are going to go if their state government makes it harder for them to live their lives and access the medical care they need. Yet their experiences, similarly, are almost never reflected in the national media. If you work in the media, the odds are good you live in New York, Washington DC, or Los Angeles, and thus live in a place where trans healthcare is unlikely to be banned, even in a second Trump administration. That means that the idea of transness becomes something more theoretical, a question of fairness to be pondered endlessly, rather than something with real life-or-death stakes. (Also, probably, someone got testy with you once about their neopronouns.)

All of this adds up to the curious effect of the argument around "echo chambers" largely ending up being about whether or not centrist pundits should be allowed to "just ask questions" without being dogpiled or blocked. But none of the questions being asked in these dialogues are at all new. It is not as though someone is swooping into a conversation about trans rights with a brand new piece of information they've recovered via rigorous research or reporting; they're usually just arriving to say, like, "But you have to admit that trans women are biological men." Even if I were sympathetic to that argument – and obviously, I'm not – of what use is repeating it the millionth time? What is being accomplished?

"Let's not build an echo chamber" is almost never used to protect genuinely heterodox views from the left or right. It is, instead, used to protect the most mealy-mouthed arguments that have been repeated ad nauseum, in an almost religious hope that if one just keeps repeating, "But you have to admit there are different levels of intellectual capacity among the different races?" it will at a certain point either become true or (perhaps better) get someone who disagrees with that premise to get into an argument. The desire to not have an echo chamber, then, is driven not by a desire to hear new ideas but, rather, to create a permission structure for endless masturbatory debate.

What transgressive views are supposedly suppressed by the echo chamber are coarser, ruder, and more prejudiced than other transgressive views. How many times in these articles about echo chambers across our entire too-online history have you seen people complaining about, say, a lack of vegans (to pick a left-coded community that is more or less mainstream but still niche) on any of these websites? Now think how many times you've seen complaints about not getting enough of any perceived right-wing demographic on a platform.

I do genuinely think it's worthwhile to get outside of one's bubble, but I think such a thing is best done deliberately. I am not going to suddenly encounter an idea that challenges my worldview in a tweet or skeet because that's not a great medium for such ideas. When I look for stuff that genuinely pushes me to reconsider the fundamental underpinnings of what I believe, that's almost always arriving in the form of a book or at least an essay. (Here is one such book! I really struggle with everything it's saying, but it also broadened my understanding of so many things.)

Too often, however, what the people who long for an end to "the echo chamber" want is a space where they can repeat the same handful of arguments and talking points that have been distilled down to their essence. If they say them often enough, in a small enough space, then they might bounce around off the walls and become loud enough that they are all anyone can hear. Wouldn't it be a shame to be trapped in just such a chamber?

This week's reading music: "Nomad" by Clairo

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