No, Bluesky isn’t celebrating the assassination of Charlie Kirk
Following the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk on Wednesday, some of his fellow right-wing media leaders called out a supposedly toxic hub in which liberals and leftists were gathering to celebrate the killing: Bluesky.
“Actually, you should go see what they are saying on BlueSky right now,” podcaster Stephen L. Miller wrote on X. He urged liberal commentator Ezra Klein to repost a sympathetic message on Bluesky and “report back.”
Sean Davis, CEO of the Federalist, wrote that “deranged left-wing personalities on BlueSky deliberately incite violence, and when it happens, they take the psychopath’s route of mocking and gaslighting the victims.”
Even some large accounts not associated with the right-wing content mill identified a trend. “Every post on Bluesky is celebrating the assassination,” author Tim Urban said. “Such unbelievably sick people.” Elon Musk piggybacked on that one, “They are celebrating cold-blooded murder.”
Kirk’s killing is an unqualified moral disaster. If indeed a critical mass of left-of-center people were celebrating it in the digital streets of Bluesky, that would be a sign of a political movement’s decay and the irredeemability of a social media platform.
The problem with this story is that it is not true. If you spent your Wednesday absorbing thousands of posts on Bluesky—as I did, for whatever reason—it would be difficult to make an honest case that the platform’s users were celebrating en masse. There were indeed a lot of people doing that. Just not close to a majority, let alone “every post.” And while overwrought right-wing characterizations of the left-of-center response were egged on by some of the largest accounts in conservative politics, the lefty joking about Kirk’s death did not come from movement leaders. The sentiment that Bluesky was treating Kirk’s murder like an online VE Day does real harm to all of us, because it’s a stand-in for a broader effort to connect the vile work of one killer to millions of people who would condemn it. That effort is poison. [Continue reading…]