In Defense Of Echo Chambers

Partisan Bubbles Can Blind You To Reality, But They Can Also Become Reality

If you haven’t been yet, let me introduce you to Bluesky, or “Liberal Twitter,” as it’s becoming known.

Bluesky has been around for a while. It was initially part of Twitter but spun off in 2021. It first became a destination for liberal-leaning users when Elon Musk – reeling from the hit manhood took after his daughter came out as transgender against his wishes and his partner Grimes left him – bought Twitter to make it a playground for neofascists.

However, Bluesky didn’t really take off until this month, after Donald Trump won the presidential election. Liberals and Democrats, seeking to escape the mocking and celebrating on Twitter, began signing up for Bluesky in droves. As of Monday, November 25th, the platform has over 20 million users, with one million joining daily at one point in mid-November.

The exodus from Twitter to Bluesky has predictably led many pundits, already critical of progressives and Democrats, to claim that liberals were making their problems worse by leaving Twitter – where conservative and MAGA voices are everywhere – for an “echo chamber.” While I understand the criticism of sealing yourself in a partisan bubble, lecturing liberals for moving over to Bluesky came across to me as frustration from those who feel liberals must subject themselves to relentless bullying and mocking as some mandatory penance they must endure for losing the election. Fleeing into echo chambers is a common coping mechanism after a loss. While it could lead to partisans losing touch with the majority opinions, those echo chambers frequently become fertile ground for future organizing and political wins.

After Bill Clinton won in 1992, conservatives retreated to talk radio, listening to hours upon hours of Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing polemicists who were seemingly “out of touch” with America. In 1994, Republicans won Congress and halted Climton’s agenda. After George W. Bush was reelected in 2004, liberals sealed themselves in a blog bubble, spending their time on websites like DailyKos and MyDD. They were labeled “cowards” who would continue to be “out of touch” with an increasingly conservative America. Bush supporters mocked the “liberal blogosphere” as “safe spaces” in the months after Bush’s reelection, expecting these spaces to solidify their dominance in politics by ensuring liberals remained out of touch with the country.

Within a year, though, the liberal blogosphere became a hotbed for political activity within the Democratic Party. It helped stir the Democratic base to deliver the party big wins in the 2005, 2006, and 2008 elections. When the Tea Party emerged after Obama’s win in 2008, everyone mocked their obsession with Fox News. Still, Fox began a messaging apparatus that helped push them to significant victories in 2010 and 2014. Facebook groups were a big reason MAGA exploded in 2016 and helped QAnon become mainstream after the COVID-19 Pandemic, catching liberals by surprise after they dismissed it as fringe nonsense. That played a significant role in Trump’s win this year.

I’m not saying echo chambers can’t lead to people being out of touch. The biggest problem with echo chambers is that they often make you think your views represent the majority. As someone who spends much time in echo chambers, I believe that’s a skill issue. You can socialize in echo chambers and then go outside and “touch grass.” I did. That’s how I could foresee all the problems progressives and Democrats are having today. You can coexist in the echo chambers and the real world. You have to.

What “out of touch” means is a fluid definition in politics. What is “in touch” in 2024 may not be in 2026 or 2028. That was a lesson those of us old enough to remember the second Bush term learned. No one could have predicted in November 2004 that Nancy Pelosi would become the first woman Speaker of the House in two years. There was talk at that time of dumping her as Democratic floor leader and replacing her with a moderate from the Midwest or the South. No one could have predicted that two after that, a black man from Chicago who never supported the Iraq War would not only be the Democratic nominee for president but would win a landslide against the most beloved Republican in the county, even carrying the state of Indiana in the process – a state that voted for Bush by 20 percent in 2004 and hadn’t voted Democratic since 1964. It happened because the political winds shifted hard against the Bush coalition in the intermediate four years. Only two months after Bush was sworn in for his second term, the husband of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman who had been in a vegetative state for over a decade, opted to take her off life support against the wishes of her parents. The private family battle exploded into a national issue that led Republicans to intervene in a massively unpopular move. It was the first of many events that shook the public’s confidence in the recently reelected president and his party, whom they had just given complete control of the federal government.

Later, the Iraq War went pear-shaped, and the public turned firmly against it. The federal response to Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 made many Bush voters question the administration's competence. A series of scandals rocked the White House, including the outing of a covert agent Valerie Plame by then-Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby. As public confidence in the Republican Party fell and the sands shifted, the liberal “echo chambers,” the blogosphere that was once mocked as an echo chamber, became a destination for disappointed and wayward former Bush voters to land. Facebook, then still limited to college campuses, and liberal-leaning media networks like MSNBC and NPR did as well. Bush’s former supporters and other Americans increasingly joined the echo chambers until those social circles were no longer out of touch with what the median American voter was thinking.

We don’t know what the next few years will bring or what will happen in the second Trump administration, but if liberals are correct, there is bound to be some massive political overreach and a sense of betrayal among those who voted for him. Some of Trump’s Cabinet picks have gotten thumbs down from some of his voters already. Trump is promoting dangerous economic tariff policies that risk causing worse inflation and sending the economy into a tailspin. We don’t know what will happen with Ukraine and Gaza, two wars he promised to end but has little control over. Trump’s plan to discharge every transgender member of the military could be seen as an overreach, and his mass deportation plan could turn into a humanitarian catastrophe. We saw how he botched the COVID-19 Pandemic. There is no doubt he will face another national crisis. Any of these things can become Trump’s Iraq War or Katrina. If that happens, there are bound to be millions of his 2024 voters who will be looking for a place to find like-minded fellow Americans who want to organize to oppose him or push for change in the next elections.

Suppose things go the way many of us liberals expect them to, then, like Rush Limbaugh and right-wing talk radio hosts in Clinton’s presidency, the anti-war liberals on the blogosphere in Bush’s second term, and the MAGA holdouts on Truth Social and podcasts during Biden’s term, anti-Trump liberals will be ready. We will be at Bluesky and other echo chambers, prepared to welcome the defectors and organize to help a rested and ready Democratic Party win in 2026 and 2028.

And if it doesn’t? Well, at least we’ll be arguing about the best way to improve healthcare or fight for marginalized people, and not arguing with someone who tells you your transgender friend did the world a favor by killing herself because his or her primary reason for conversing with you is to inflict pain, not exchange ideas.

Follow me on Bluesky at @nickrafter.bsky.social