Tl;dr far-right X users are trying to have their cake and eat it too.

And it's not like Bluesky is devoid of right-leaning users. It's just not as radically right or nearly algorithmically biased as X.

Right-leaning X users are frustrated that leftists won't play their games.

Ah well.

Conservative digital spaces thrive on alienating marginalized and othered people/communities. It's about power and control.

But it is also an affective (emotional) space. It thrives off of hate and fear mongering.

So who are you left to bully and belittle when everyone you hate leaves?

So far-right X users got what they wanted, right?

Wrong!

While the goal of X was to minimize the presence, voice, and power of left-leaning Twitter users/spaces, it did not factor in a mass exodus of left-leaning users altogether.

Quite simply, conservative X spaces are now starved.

Being able to pay for content boosting meant that conservatives could bypass algorithm building altogether.

Deplatforming and shadowbanning accounts that discussed social justice issues limited leftist exposure.

Algorithms no longer determined what cultivated Twitrer feeds.

And it worked!

Without a doubt, X's algorithm is meant to cultivate a right-leaning feed. Many leftists (myself included) saw their feed become increasingly conservative *in spite* of never interacting with conservative content.

It's not even that the algorithms are broken. X is broken.

Musk's acquisition of Twitter was the direct result of it's perception as a left-leaning utopia.

In all actuality, there were still conservative spaces on Twittrer. It just depended on your algorithm.

The real core issue is that conservatives wanted leftists gone from the platform altogether.

This brings us to the surge of far-right Twitter users post-2016.

As Twitter was still fairly left-leaning at the time, conservatives began bemoaning it as a leftist echochamber. It's "wokeness" was brainwashing the masses (a racialized discourse that is for an entirely different thread).

Funnily enough, the same cannot be said about liberal to left-leaning digital spaces.

For anyone interested, I highly recommend Benkler et. al.'s Networked Propaganda, which dives into the specifics of how/why the radicalization of the right occurred on FB but not for the center or left.

By the mid-2010s, algorithms began posing a larger socio-cultural dilemma. They were pushing folks further and further into digital echochambers.

We can even credit FB circa 2015 with the radicalization of the right, as FB algorithms were pushing conservative users into far-right digital spaces.

It is undeniable that Black Twitter shaped Twitter writ large. It's leftist texture is the result of anti-racist and equity-based movements that emerged from Black users on the platform.

Twitter became a mass public space that could amplify the voices of those at the margins of society.

Twitter might have began as a site to keep up with your favorite celebrities, but it rapidly transformed into a more communal space.

Black Twitter users found the space to be conducive not only of in-group conversations about Black culture but also social justice movements (see BLM and MeToo).

It's important to understand the history of Twitter to understand *why* X exists to begin with.

Twitter accrued a robust global community. It began with a large BIPOC population, with Black Twitter users comprising the largest population of users on the platform.