Nov 21, 2024 1:47 PM

There has been a mass migration from X to Bluesky. What does it mean for our already-fragmented social media ecosystem?

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Since the election, a number of organizations, journalists, and left-leaning X users have announced their intentions to leave the town square formerly known as Twitter and move over to Threads or Bluesky. Leah talks with WIRED reporters David Gilbert and Vittoria Elliott about what these X-pats will find on the newer platforms, what happens to X when there are no more libs to troll, and just how fragmented online communities are now.

Leah Feiger is @LeahFeiger. David Gilbert is @DaithaiGilbert. Vittoria Elliott is @telliotter. Write to us at [email protected]. Be sure to subscribe to the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter here.

Mentioned this week:

Donald Trump Taps Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy to Lead Nonexistent Department of Government Efficiency by Vittoria Elliott

As Trump Takes a Victory Lap, the Crypto Faithful Kiss the Ring by Joel Khalili

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Leah Feiger: This is WIRED Politics Lab, a show about how tech is changing politics. I’m Leah Feiger, the senior politics editor at WIRED. X is not what it used to be. In fact, ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, the site has changed. Not everyone has loved that Musk gutted the content moderation team, replatformed the far-right, and promoted his own posts to the top of everyone’s newsfeed. But Musk himself has been having a great time. After all, he and his platform helped elect Donald Trump. So what does it matter that publications like The Guardian are quitting X, calling it a toxic media platform that Musk uses to shape political discourse? And plenty of others, journalists, researchers, and regular people, are leaving too, often for places like Threads or Bluesky. Are these platforms any better? What happens to X when lots of people leave? And is social media doomed to more and more fragmentation? Joining us from Cork, Ireland, is WIRED reporter David Gilbert. Hi, David.

David Gilbert: Hi, Leah.

Leah Feiger: And in the studio with me is WIRED reporter Vittoria Elliott. Hey, Tori.

Vittoria Elliott: Hey, Leah.

Leah Feiger: Guys, how are you doing? What social media platforms are you on right now?

Vittoria Elliott: A violent question if I’m honest. I’m all in on Bluesky.

Leah Feiger: Yeah?

Vittoria Elliott: Oh yeah.

Leah Feiger: OK.

Vittoria Elliott: I’m just hanging out and people are following me. It’s the lowest lift of any platform I’ve had to engage in in a while.

Leah Feiger: So you just like the attention?

Vittoria Elliott: I do just like the attention. I love getting little pings on my phone every day validating me.

Leah Feiger: It’s what Twitter used to be for so many people. David, you’re on Bluesky too, right?

David Gilbert: I sure am. I’m even following you, Leah, finally.

Leah Feiger: I know. I had to beg for it. It was upsetting.

David Gilbert: I’m very busy though. I have lots of new followers to be vetting and checking.

Leah Feiger: To attend to.

David Gilbert: Yeah.

Leah Feiger: So rude. So what’s up? Do you guys like it more than X right now? There’s just been this massive exodus it feels like to me of not only journalists, but left leaning people across the board. What are the reasons why?

David Gilbert: For me at least it’s just less triggering. It’s less toxic. It’s just easier to be there for a while and scrolling and not be triggered by something stupid that someone has said, which is what X had turned into recently. And I think I’m happier just to spend time there. The engagement seems to be more natural, authentic. Just conversations happening rather than just people shouting all the time. And I don’t know, it’s very early days and I think it could potentially be really good, but it could also potentially be terrible because it’s the internet.

Leah Feiger: The CEO says that they’re gaining like a million users a day. That is a wild stat.

Vittoria Elliott: Yeah. I mean, so I agree with David, the user experience is just better. I mean, even though it’s a little slower in the load because they are gaining so many people so quickly, it is a platform that you feel is designed not to vacuum up all of your attention. So if you notice like with X, sometimes you’ll find a really interesting post and then the website will auto load and then it’ll push you back up to the top, so you have to keep scrolling. And Bluesky doesn’t function that way. It feels like old social media where you’re like, I’m here to see the things I want to see, but this isn’t designed in a way that makes me feel like the ultimate goal is just to make me lose as much time on this website as possible.

Leah Feiger: Well, that to me feels like it’s going to fail then. They want you on these platforms.

David Gilbert: I think ultimately you’re right. I think that that’s the reason that YouTube has been so successful is because their algorithm is unbelievably good at promoting the next thing for you to watch that you want to watch. And that’s why it’s been so good at radicalizing people for years before they tried to fix it. But ultimately, I think you’re right. I think Bluesky isn’t going to be a place where people spend hours and hours and they’re able to sell huge amounts of ads, and that they’re going to become the next Facebook or the next TikTok. But I think that’s OK. I don’t think that’s what they are trying to do, but it’s really hard to know because it’s such early days I think of it being relatively popular.

Vittoria Elliott: But I also think if you’re comparing it to Twitter, which Bluesky was incubated at Twitter.

Leah Feiger: This was a Jack Dorsey research project.

Vittoria Elliott: It was a Jack Dorsey baby project, and he’s no longer involved in it.

Leah Feiger: And in fact told people in May that they should stay on Elon Musk’s X, right?

Vittoria Elliott: Yes, because they are buddies and Jack Dorsey did ultimately support the sale of the platform to Musk. And Jack Dorsey has been very involved in the crypto space and has a lot to gain from some of the ways the tech industry…

David Gilbert: Oh, you’re so cynical, Tori.

Vittoria Elliott: Oh, well, thank you.

Leah Feiger: She loved that, David.

Vittoria Elliott: Thank you. So I think even with Twitter, Twitter did not do the Meta thing where it was like we’re going to grow and we’re going to be like this invasive species into all these other places. Twitter was very much like, we know what we’re good at and we’re going to keep doing that. Even when they bought Vine, they basically didn’t really utilize the short form video thing to grow into that medium very well. And X now still has fewer users than many of Meta’s products, than TikTok, all this stuff. And so I actually think it’s totally fine that the thing that does seem to be the burgeoning Twitter replacement is not going to be where everybody is, but is doing exactly what Twitter used to do, which is be the place where influential people are.

Leah Feiger: So I want to get to the fragmentation a little bit more in a second. But for you both, are you just Bluesky users now? Do you also have X accounts? What other social media platforms are you on?

David Gilbert: Yeah, Bluesky I think…

Leah Feiger: Actually David’s list is rough. Give us the list, David.

David Gilbert: No, but I suppose professionally I’m everywhere. But from a personal point of view, it’s amazing how quickly I have stopped looking at it when it’s not for work. I am checking Bluesky more often. But as Tori said, I don’t find myself spending an hour scrolling through it or whatever. I don’t personally use TikTok. I use Instagram a little bit. That’s about it though. X or Twitter was my social media place where I spent the vast majority of my time when I was on social media, but that has completely changed. And I think it’s because a combination of everyone else has moved to Bluesky now, so there’s loads of people there to talk to, and just waiting for something to give me an alternative to X.

Leah Feiger: And Tori, what platforms are you on right now?

Vittoria Elliott: I’m on Bluesky. I do love TikTok for both personal use. It is full of silly things that I like, and it’s also great for sourcing. People love sharing first-person personal stories there. I really appreciate it. And people when they put it out in that public way seem like halfway ready to talk. So I love finding people to chat with on it for my work. And then Instagram is I think the one that I keep most personal.

Leah Feiger: I know. You won’t even let me follow you.

Vittoria Elliott: Yeah. I outed on WIRED Politics Lab. Yeah. And here is my big thing, I technically still have an X account, I cannot access it. And I haven’t been able to since July. And I wish it was a sexy thing, like I had done some fancy reporting and they had locked me out. No. What happened was I was biking in New York. My phone fell out of my pocket. It got hit by a business, actually run over by two buses.

Leah Feiger: I remember the StayWell.

Vittoria Elliott: Yeah. It was violent and brutal, and I had to get a new phone. And now X requires two-factor authentication. And so I had the Google Authenticator on my phone. And something in the transfer of the two phones, it didn’t remember the accounts that it was linked to. And so when I went to go back into my X account, I couldn’t. I go through their process of their little help desk and they were like, “Give us your email,” and I give them my email. And they’re like, “That email is not connected to your account.” But then they would email to that same email my recovery code, which I then couldn’t put into their website because they told me that my email was not registered on X with an account. And so it was just this death spiral of their product, which is their customer service part of their product, not working well enough in order for me to recover my account. And I think honestly that is emblematic of so many things about X, which is that like yes, it is still functioning with 20% of the staff, but what is the actual user experience of this now? Even if you are someone who enjoys the shitty ads and the AI bullshit and the algorithm that is feeding you people that you are not necessarily trying to follow and the election disinformation, even if all of that is exactly how you want to experience the internet, which I don’t think it is for many people, even if you like certain parts of it.

Leah Feiger: That to me is so much of it. We can talk all we want about different people fleeing platforms for another platform preferences. But at the end of the day, Elon Musk’s X is still the platform where the billionaire owner himself actually with a knife and wire cutters cut these servers when he was trying to get engineers to fix things early on. This is held together with Scotch Tape basically.

Vittoria Elliott: Right. And so just this very small thing, this instance of me having to get a new phone basically I think shows a lot of the cracks that exist, which is when you get rid of a bunch of people, over time the experience on your platform, whether it’s this customer service account recovery way or the kind of ads, the algorithm, the people, it’s all starting to degrade. And I think a lot of people were on Twitter because they felt the communities they built there would not be accessible anywhere else. But Bluesky has this thing called starter packs where you can put together a bunch of different accounts that are all of the same community. So one that I reported on was about the Taylor Swift community, the Swifties, and there’s a bunch of starter packs for Swifties to follow each other. So basically you can bring your community over and you don’t have to do what you had to do as a new Twitter user, which is find everyone from scratch.

Leah Feiger: Totally, and which I guess really starts to get us into what is social media for? A very large question. But what are people hoping to get out of it, news, community, memes? Is this fragmentation and all these different platform options, is this just leaning into the fact that people have different requirements and they’re looking for different things, or does it point to more political separation as a lot of people have been discussing as well?

David Gilbert: Yeah, I think it’s probably all of those things, and I think it’s potentially the end of a life cycle of social media as we know it, in that this idea where everyone is on one platform all talking to each other, all talking at each other I guess in a lot of cases rather than talking to each other and a reversion back to more community orientated spaces where like-minded people gather and share ideas. The one thing about that though is I think that works for a vast majority of groups online. But for one group who now dominate Twitter, the far-right or the alt right or the right wing angry posters, that doesn’t work for them because they don’t like just shouting at each other. They need someone to get angry at. And I think what showed this to me most was the fact that this week someone set up a Libs of Bluesky account on X.

Leah Feiger: Oh my God, I love it. I love it, I love it, I love it.

David Gilbert: And all they’re doing is trolling through Bluesky feeds and posting stuff that they see as Libs giving out about the far-right and reposting it on X. And everyone will just pile in and say how crazy all these people are. And so they’ve set up this account as a way of solving their anger rather than moving to Bluesky, which some of them are doing anyway, but not in huge numbers yet. And I think it just points to the fact that this group of people, this is why platforms like Truth Social and Gab and all the other fringe right wing platforms haven’t really taken off is because there’s no left leaning people there. Therefore, there’s no one to fight with.

Leah Feiger: There’s no adversary.

David Gilbert: Yeah.

Leah Feiger: I mean, look, because at the end of the day we’re talking about all of these different spaces, but it’s not like the distribution is equal. People are leaving the… I’m heading to the better place. I’m heading to the other place. Find me where the skies are blue. These have become common refrains on X in the last couple of weeks, last year even, and they lost over 100,000 people after the election really, really quickly. Ultimately, obviously though, X has millions of users. How much of a difference is this really going to make? Is Elon Musk going to be feeling any sort of hit from Bluesky?

Vittoria Elliott: I mean, financially I think probably not. And the answer to that is, A, X is already worth significantly less than the $44 billion that he paid for it mostly due to losing advertisers and users by his own behavior before this election. Some advertisers now because Musk is informally, but very publicly part of the Trump administration, Trump transition moment, are coming back to X because they’re now worried about maintaining that relationship. So I actually don’t think financially there’s a hit. I do agree with David though that the appeal for Elon of owning Twitter was the fact that this is where people on the left, journalists, politicians, were all concentrated, and the power of that platform is significantly blunted if those people are not using it. And Musk is still there. Very high profile people in the valley on the right are still there. So I think it will continue to maintain its influence as a place where those people are talking to their communities or making public statements that they might not be making on other platforms, but that’s still very different than being a place where they can engage with the Libs.

Leah Feiger: And content moderation on these sites. Obviously everyone’s doing it a little bit different. There’s no content moderation on X, for example. What are we seeing on Bluesky for that?

David Gilbert: It’s hard to know really because at the moment, from what I’ve seen on Bluesky, there’s very little that people are calling out for hate speech or spreading disinformation.

Leah Feiger: It feels a little ad hoc at the moment.

David Gilbert: It’s really interesting. It’s really earnest and nice. It’s like the internet from 20 years ago where people are a bit… There’s very, very little cynicism on there at the moment.

Leah Feiger: I’m imagining young David on the internet 20 years ago right now.

David Gilbert: But I don’t know. They’re obviously struggling a little bit to scale up at the speed that they’re gaining new users at the moment. And as Tori said, the app can be a bit janky and it doesn’t work perfectly all the time. I’m pretty sure that if there was a major disinformation campaign happening there, they would struggle to deal with that because they probably don’t have the moderators or the systems in place. But saying that, people also seem to have a lot less tolerance for talking to people who are bad actors or are trying to spread this information. People are just blocking people flat out there. Just as there are starter packs for people to follow, there are starter packs or there are lists of people to block as well.

Vittoria Elliott: And keywords to block.

David Gilbert: Yeah, so it’s very easy to keep this safe space, but it’s early days and I’m sure there are folks in the Kremlin who are looking at Bluesky going, “OK, let’s see what we can do here.” It’s going to get worse. It’s just a matter of whether it makes a significant impact or not, and I don’t think we know whether that’s going to happen or not yet.

Leah Feiger: So enjoy it while you’ve got it at the moment is the vibe. To push on this a little bit, obviously like we’ve been talking about, without a diversity of voices on X, a lot that’s left is an increasingly far-right conspiratorial echo chamber. I cannot personally go to the platform without having Elon Musk’s tweets immediately at the very top.

Vittoria Elliott: It’s the first thing.

Leah Feiger: It’s the very first thing. I’m curious to know though where each of you fall on this. Do you think it’s a mistake for all of these people to be moving over to platforms that they find more palatable? It’s one thing obviously for people that are not researchers, journalists, et cetera, and weighing in on a private citizen and how they’re spending their time. We’re in a slightly different category. Our colleagues are in a slightly different category. So many people were so absolutely shocked by the outcome of the election, and we’ve talked a lot about that at WIRED as the fragmentation of social media, the fragmentation of the internet, not understanding what far-right influencers were really doing to their bases, not understanding the far-right reach of the manosphere and even honestly the centrist reach of the manosphere. And so we weren’t hugely surprised. Is this just creating a situation where people are not even going to be shocked at what the “other side” is saying, but have truly legitimately no idea where they’re coming from or what anything they’re saying really means or has to bear on their politics?

Vittoria Elliott: I mean, I think for us as journalists or for me in my situation, I feel like… I mean, I have a lurker X account now, so I’m still monitoring conversations and I still feel like I’m listening, but my old account, which I cannot access…

Leah Feiger: I mean, you’re in a different situation. You’re the bus paradox.

Vittoria Elliott: The universe was sending me a signal. But I still think there’s 1,000% of value to listening and observing and being present in that space. And maybe it’s still really valuable for publications to be in that space to be putting their work out there just to try and keep us on the same information wavelength. But also, and I know David has experienced this probably at much greater degrees than I have, when you’re an individual out there, you’re exposing yourself to harassment. You’re exposing yourself to a level of toxicity that is not necessarily meaning that anyone’s reading your article and engaging with you thoughtfully or saying like, “Hey, you missed this thing, or have you considered that?” It’s just meant to be intimidating.

Leah Feiger: Absolutely, which is a fair argument for leaving.

David Gilbert: It is. And I think for someone who wants to understand what the far-right are thinking or the Trump administration is thinking, you need to be on X or at least monitoring it to get a sense of what’s happening. I really don’t see a case for someone who doesn’t professionally need to do that to be on X. I think there are enough journalists covering that area on Bluesky now who will be posting stories about that anyway, that they can keep up to date with what’s happening so that they can inform themselves. There are a wide variety of news outlets on Bluesky that people should subscribe to on all sides of the divide. They should be able to subscribe to news from different points of view. And that’s always been important. It’s incredibly difficult to do on X because content that is posted now by what is seen as liberal news or mainstream news outlets is absolutely being throttled and is not seen anywhere near the amount that it should be seen because we have a million Elon Musk tweets to see every day that everyone in the world needs to see all the time. There’s no reason for a normal person to have an X account anymore.

Leah Feiger: We’re going to take a quick break and we’ll be back soon with more on the fragmentation of social media and the role billionaires are playing in all of our lives. Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. We talk about fragmentation of social media all the time on this show. Just a couple of minutes ago we were talking about it. Like Katie Drummond said last week in our episode, the idea of the internet as an open forum is debt. So who benefits from these different silos that are being created?

David Gilbert: Talking about the silos that we have seen created over the last 10 years or so, most of them, or a lot of them have happened on the far-right, or the ones I’m following at least. And in those cases it’s the people who set up the platforms are the ones that are benefiting because they set up the platform to push their agendas and they create rules that suit them. They’re not platforms… Well, they all claim to be platforms about free speech and allowing whatever. That’s not the case. They allow free speech as long as it aligns with their Christian agenda in case of Gab or pro-Trump agenda in case of Truth Social. It all depends on what’s happening. Those spaces are designed to help the people who set them up. In the case of Bluesky, because of the way it’s been set up and the fact that it can at any point be taken and moved and set up again by someone else I think points to the fact that this is about the users and the user experience and that is seeking to be a better place for people who want social media to be like it was years ago before it became this toxic place where it’s all about engagement, all about being the loudest voice in the room and all about feeding the algorithm. So I think who benefits is dependent on what platform or what silo we’re talking about.

Vittoria Elliott: I mean, I agree with David that so much of what we have come to understand is our social media infrastructure and ecosystem is driven off rage, sensationalism, engagement. And anything that’s designed that way is at most capitalist and cynically designed to make people money. I mean, that is why again and again and again we’ve seen inflammatory content stay up on all these platforms. This is why that many former Facebook and Meta employees I’ve spoken to have said that the most successful content is the stuff that gets right up to that line of being violative of their policies, but doesn’t cross it because that is where you’re getting sensationalism and anger and activation. And so even if we’re not talking about maybe the political leanings of an owner like Musk, just very cynically on the money side, who benefits is whoever can keep eyeballs on their platform long enough to sell that data and make a lot of money on ads.

Leah Feiger: I mean, that brings us… Yeah, you brought us right to Meta Threads, which is another X competitor. Although I have to be honest, I haven’t looked at my Threads account in a good period of time. Threads is owned by Meta, so there’s the Mark Zuckerberg quotient of it all. Are people just trading one billionaire for another?

Vittoria Elliott: Well, so first off, I think a big thing, Threads and Instagram said earlier this year that they were going to de-prioritize political content and obviously what Meta considers to be “political content” is vague and ever-changing.

Leah Feiger: That’s maybe the best definition I’ve heard of their priorities in a while. Good.

Vittoria Elliott: But also that means that part of what was interesting and cool about old Twitter was that you could find people with strong opinions that you might not otherwise have encountered. And Threads doesn’t really seem like a lot of that. I mean, and again, I can only speak from what I see in mine, it’s a lot of dating advice. It’s a lot of personal stories.

Leah Feiger: Complaints about flying and issues with American Airlines. For whatever reason, something you just said absolutely triggered a memory of Social Network, the movie, depicting Zuckerberg and the rise of Facebook where when he’s arguing with Eduardo Saverin in one scene, the conversation reportedly goes, Saverin’s like, “We got to start advertising. We have to start making money off of this.” And Zuckerberg’s like, “Not yet. It’s cool. It’s this cool thing that we have to be holding onto. And it’s just not ready.” The one thing I can say about Meta’s platforms is that they’re incredibly uncool. They’re incredibly lame.

Vittoria Elliott: Deeply uncool.

Leah Feiger: And so looking at watching the goal line change, like you said, vague, ever-changing, all of the above, I keep going back to what are all of these platforms for? If Threads is the one where you go to complain because your Uber Eats order drove to the wrong neighborhood, or your seatmate on a flight was kicking the chair in front of them, Bluesky is where you go to be shielded from the conspiracists, X is where you go to get indoctrinated or share your conspiracies. All of these different silos are still making these respective companies their money. This works for them.

David Gilbert: I just see Threads as it’s such a cynical move by Facebook who it cost them not a lot of money to roll this out and they got massive numbers of people signing up because it was linked to your Instagram and it’s just very easy to sign up. But I know no one who uses it. I don’t use it. I tried for a while, got zero engagement obviously because as you said, it doesn’t care about news. And any time I have had to scroll through it for work, it just seems like the most anodyne content that is posted there. And maybe that’s just what is being shown to me because maybe they think that’s what I like, but it just seems like a ploy by Meta to go, “OK, we need an alternative.”

Leah Feiger: To be in the space even if we’re not…

David Gilbert: Exactly. And by next year it could be gone. It could just disappear because it doesn’t do anything for them.

Vittoria Elliott: I think Threads is a text version of Instagram and the things that are successful in Instagram are like wellness, dating.

Leah Feiger: It’s all the good stuff about Instagram sends the…

Vittoria Elliott: Yeah, because it’s also a lot of astrology, a lot of woo-woo, a lot of all that stuff, fitness. And it’s like that is the content that’s very successful on Instagram, but it’s stripped of a lot of the things that makes that interesting on Instagram, which is the visual component.

Leah Feiger: And so I guess this gets me to platforms that are similar to each other. Truth Social and X, can they continue to coexist? Are they pulling from the same user base? What are your predictions there?

David Gilbert: Well, I think the big thing is that who is going to get most of the right wing dating adverts? Is it going to be X?

Leah Feiger: Where is date night stuff advertising? Where will you buy your Ivermectin and discounted gold, David?

David Gilbert: I think whoever wins that battle is going to be the ultimate victor here between… Yeah, but it kind of makes sense that they’d combine in some sort of horrific way, TruthX or XTruth or whatever they’re going to call it, it’s going to be terrible.

Leah Feiger: It all amps up into the big part of it, which was Elon Musk not just getting active users, not just making money from this platform, which hasn’t done the return on investment, but spreading the good word of the GOP.

Vittoria Elliott: Well, and I’ve been looking at least Trump’s posts across the two platforms and he basically copy and paste the same thing that he’s putting on Truth Social onto X.

Leah Feiger: He does.

Vittoria Elliott: But fundamentally, they are serving the same purpose and increasingly the same audience, especially as people that would again otherwise function as adversaries leave X, because now you’re just making it a bigger clunkier version of Truth Social. And I think what’s interesting is the FT reported earlier this week that Truth Social was in talks to buy a crypto trading venue, which I think is interesting, A, because of the way that we’ve seen Musk and other crypto people really use X as a booster for whatever crypto thing they’re involved in. Even the fact that Musk’s new Department of Government Efficiency is the acronym is DOGE, and that is Dogecoin, which is…

Leah Feiger: I mean, it doesn’t exist yet and it’s actually unclear if it will or what form it will take, but I mean, it’s all terrible.

Vittoria Elliott: But I think really what we’re going to see, my instinct is that we’re going to see both Truth Social and X move more towards a merger with crypto and possibly also AI because we have xAI.

Leah Feiger: Let’s throw Polymarket in there. I’m envisioning year 2035, and we have X is in fact… X won the Truth Social war, but it’s integrated with the crypto Polymarket version of Coinbase. It’s like burst this whole new thing and they’re all linked. You use one account to buy, sell, trade, bet, and post about Emperor Trump.

Vittoria Elliott: Trump Coin.

David Gilbert: That’s what Musk has always wanted with X. He looks at the major apps in China like WeChat and he wants X to be the everything app. He wants it to be your bank. He wants it to be all this kind of stuff.

Leah Feiger: All these liberals on Bluesky or all of a sudden going to wake up from this lovely safe space dream in five years and go, “Wait, what? You can vote on if you want Trump to retain power? How did this happen?”

Vittoria Elliott: Well, and this actually gets to a point that I have been thinking deeply about, which is it would not surprise… I mean, as Tim and you and I discussed a couple weeks ago, barring a monumental blowout between Trump and Musk, which still seems like it’s on the cards.

Leah Feiger: I mean, I just want to read about it so badly. I want the Live HBO special. This is my Paul versus Tyson.

Vittoria Elliott: I mean, but I think barring a blowout like that, because Musk has really used China as the roadmap for what he wants X to be, what better way to get everything app than starting to do things like integrating having an X account into accessing different parts of the government? Whether that’s like, oh, you need to apply for health insurance. You need to put in your X account app. You need to verify it.

Leah Feiger: No! This can’t be possible. Is this your prediction? This is your prediction?

Vittoria Elliott: My prediction is that we’re going to see a fusion of it across multiple things. Maybe Truth Social moves more into the crypto space.

Leah Feiger: I see a fusion. I see a fusion.

Vittoria Elliott: But logging into my IRS account with my two factor X, I think platform just sounds…

David Gilbert: Tori, you’re in real trouble if this happens because you can’t get access to your X accounts.

Leah Feiger: Tori never pays her taxes again. This is the last that we’ve ever heard from Vittoria Elliott.

Vittoria Elliott: This is amazing. Listen, but I truly don’t know if this is the case, but I would not be surprised given that Musk is already trying to accept applications for what would functionally be government jobs on X via DM.

Leah Feiger: Via DM, might we add.

Vittoria Elliott: I would not be surprised if we see him at least floating ideas in the next few months about ways that X can be integrated with accessing government services.

Leah Feiger: Well, these are all horrifying thoughts and I’m going to go cry after this. So guys, is fragmentation the new norm? And if so, what’s the way out of it? Logging off, touching grass, reading something you disagree with, going to the beach with your friends to pick up trash.

David Gilbert: I don’t know if we’ve been through the peak year of social media where people felt they needed to be on every app all the time and checking their messages, checking their engagement, all that stuff. I think people are becoming more conscious of how damaging social media can be to your mental health. Certainly in some countries, the damage it’s doing to children’s mental health has been taken extremely seriously and there are provisions being put in place. We’ve seen in Australia where they put bans in place. There’s talk about this here in Europe. I’m not sure if there’s going to be much talk about this in the US with Elon Musk in charge of everything. But people are going to pick and choose more carefully where they post, what they post, who they engage with. And I think people seem at least to be tired of the constant shouting and anger and vitriol and hate. And I think that’s why X is ultimately doomed, unless, as you suggest, it becomes the government app for some reason. I think people can only take so much of that type of content. And I hope that Bluesky is an indication of how you can have a better type of social media. I don’t necessarily think it’s going to be this massive app. Maybe it will be, but I don’t necessarily think it will be. But it could be just a place where you can go and get some information and talk to some interesting people. And that sounds really nice.

Vittoria Elliott: I mean, I think frankly, fragmentation is probably really helpful because so much of conspiracy theory when I look at it really empathetically is people who see that there’s problems in the world, they have an understanding of some data points around it, but they don’t have enough information to draw the right conclusion around it, but they have access to more information than they probably should to be able to form that opinion. You know what I mean? In terms of having to sift through what’s real and what’s not. And I think if we look at a lot of these conspiracy communities, they also come out of a hunger for community, a hunger to be seen and have connection and purpose with people. And the reality is that’s what our brains are designed for. We’re not designed to be taking in all the world’s information and synthesizing it and sifting through it. Communities of trust is what allows things to be manageable. And study after study shows that, A, part of the way you change people’s minds and, B, part of the way people absorb information credibly is through people they know and through smaller communities and communities of trust. And I think as much as fragmentation right now has this negative connotation because 2016 was the year of the filter bubble and we all felt like, “Well, we weren’t doing a good job of listening to the other side. We didn’t know. We didn’t know,” there’s a way in which we can say, “Actually maybe this is positive. Maybe we should be thinking as a publication, as people, as users, what is a healthy and robust community and who more clearly can we serve?” Because even as media, I think a lot of publications have been pulled towards having to cover everything Because They were on social media platforms and they felt like their audience was potentially everyone. And it almost feels like we’re returning to the roots of media of information ecosystems, which is smaller communities of people that care about similar stuff where there is a baseline level of trust and talking to each other and letting stuff grow from there.

Leah Feiger: A lot to think about. I guess my one plea for everyone listening this weekend, go outside, log off for even a little bit.

David Gilbert: I thought you were going to say follow me on Bluesky.

Leah Feiger: And follow me on Bluesky. We’re going to take a quick break. And when we’re back, it’s time for Conspiracy of the Week. Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. It is time for our favorite segment of the show, Conspiracy of the Week. Over the last couple of weeks as we’ve been closely covering the election, we haven’t really needed to do a Conspiracy of the Week because conspiracies have been the theme of the day. They have been all around us. But a couple weeks out, we are back. We are excited. David, Tori, what do you have for us today?

David Gilbert: Well, my conspiracy today is related to the election.

Leah Feiger: Of course, it is.

David Gilbert: And to most of the people we’ve been talking about today, especially Elon Musk. It’s relation to that now infamous picture of Trump and Musk and RFK Jr. and Don Jr. and Mike Johnson, I think, on Trump’s plane all eating McDonald’s.

Leah Feiger: I love that photo.

David Gilbert: I’m sure everyone has seen this and everyone has been focused on the fact that RFK Jr. is all about making America healthy again and he’s there eating processed food, which he has given out about in the past, and they focused on his face. There’s a whole other cohort of people online who have focused on other things in the picture, and they believe that this is comms in their parlance, which means that the picture isn’t there to signify that they ate McDonald’s, but it’s to signify something else. So one of the things that QAnon folks have focused in on is the fact that Trump appears, and it’s really unclear in the picture because I’ve looked really closely, it appears as if he is eating a filet of fish, that that’s in front of him because he’s got this blue box. So for some people, this signifies I think they used the term Tiffany’s Blue McDonald’s and using gematria, which is this numerology system…

Leah Feiger: You have to credit my people a little bit.

David Gilbert: Sorry, yes. They’re using a bastardized version of the Jewish numerology system gematria.

Leah Feiger: Thank you.

David Gilbert: And by using the term Tiffany Blue Box, which is something they made up to describe the McDonald’s box, that also translates to the same number as mission accomplished. So they believe that Trump is signaling to them that this is mission accomplished. They’re in control.

Leah Feiger: God, I love that so much. That’s a good one.

David Gilbert: That was just the beginning.

Leah Feiger: David, what?

David Gilbert: Very quickly they were able to link this to another post on Truth Social by a random account from September 2023, which is 424 days since that picture was taken. And they were able to link that to the 424th Q-drop which says fully operational, resolved. And that’s how they are able to explain where this picture and that is the level of insanity that is still out there in terms of QAnon and the people who believe that every single thing that happens in the world is some sort of signal to them.

Vittoria Elliott: I think there’s a certain level of narcissism to believe that the world is always signaling to you.

Leah Feiger: To you and you alone.

Vittoria Elliott: Yeah.

Leah Feiger: And only you understand. All right, Tori, what do you got for us?

Vittoria Elliott: Wow! Well, that was extraordinarily well layered, so I don’t think I can compete, but.

Leah Feiger: Tori’s just in it for the win always.

Vittoria Elliott: I really am. But last week there were congressional hearings on UFOs, specifically UFOs in the ocean, which really kicked off a lot of fun thoughts. And honestly, I find the idea that maybe there’s some alien overlords that are coming to rescue us from ourselves incredibly peaceful.

Leah Feiger: To be honest, oh my gosh, I was so hoping that one of you is going to bring this up because it is… I’ve thought about it more than I probably should have. As a scuba diver, shout out to my girls at scuba ladies, I would love to encounter some aliens on these dives. And to be fair, it is ethereal down there. It is spooky down there. It is good. It is ripe for aliens.

Vittoria Elliott: Right.

Leah Feiger: I believe it.

Vittoria Elliott: Me too, and I’m really hopeful. I’m like, listen, man, we’re not driving this planet super well, so if you have input, please, now is the time.

Leah Feiger: And save the whales too while you’re at it.

Vittoria Elliott: Oh yeah! Not terrible, a little melancholic conspiracy I came across. Was that the reason that they have not made contact yet is because the aliens have a different sense of time than we do, and so they have been in contact with ancient cultures. That’s why we have the pyramids and stuff. Insert Ancient Aliens here. And the aliens are not making contact because they’re struggling to find the original cultures that they were in contact with. They don’t understand where they went.

Leah Feiger: Oh my God, I love that. Tori, you win.

Vittoria Elliott: Oh, thank you.

Leah Feiger: You fully win. Wow!

Vittoria Elliott: Sorry, David.

David Gilbert: It’s OK.

Vittoria Elliott: David’s like, “I have a very well-researched thing involving Jewish numerology.”

Leah Feiger: No, that was one of the easiest wins I’ve ever given. I love that. I love aliens. I love it all. That was a delight. Guys, thank you so much for joining us today. Great chats.

Vittoria Elliott: Thank you, Leah.

David Gilbert: Yeah, it’s been great.

Leah Feiger: Thanks for listening to WIRED Politics Lab. If you like what you heard today, make sure to follow the show and give us five stars. We also have a newsletter, which Makena Kelly writes each week. The link to the newsletter and the WIRED reporting we mentioned today are in the show notes. If you’d like to get in touch with us with any questions, comments, or show suggestions, please, please write to [email protected]. That’s [email protected]. We’re so excited to hear from you. WIRED Politics Lab is produced by Jake Harper. Pran Bandi is our studio engineer. Amar Lal mixed this episode. Steven Valentino is our executive producer. Chris Bannon is global head of audio at Condé Nast. And I’m your host, Leah Feiger. Have a great Thanksgiving week, and we’ll be back in your feeds with a new episode in December.