Echo Chambers and the Ethics of Blocking

Trump’s election saw a renewed wave of users feeling X/Twitter, many of them heading instead to Bluesky. Bluesky, like Threads, has a “block first” culture: Rather than responding to abusive mentions or trollish behavior, users just block and move on. Bluesky also has a widely used “shared blocklists” feature that allows people to make lists of users (e.g., people with pro-Nazi phrases in their bios) and then others can subscribe to those lists and auto-block or mute anyone on them.

Because Bluesky got its start primarily as a place for users who didn’t want to stick around Twitter when Musk took over, and is now rapidly growing because of an ongoing exodus of the same sorts of users, its community leans left. The right-wingers were happy to stay on Twitter. Reinforcing this, right-wingers who do show up tend to leave pretty quickly. They get heavily blocked, gain little engagement, and go back to friendlier territory.

All of this has led, over the last week, to an ongoing conversation about echo chambers. Is Bluesky one? (Or is Threads, which has similar dynamics?) And, if it is, is that bad? Not just in the sense of “Ideological diversity is generally good,” but bad in that it’s wrong to put most of your time into a social media platform where most people agree with you.

The most popular essay I’ve ever written is about social media echo chambers, so I have thoughts on this question. Namely, much of the criticism of “echo chambers” is conceptually confused, because it ambiguously slides between important distinctions. So let’s see if we can clarify things a bit.

Echo chambers, to the extent they are bad, are bad for a few reasons.

1. If you only ever hear ideas and arguments from people you already agree with, you won’t ever have your ideas challenged, and having your ideas challenged is important if we want to ensure they are true.

2. If you only ever hear ideas and arguments from people you already agree with, you won’t be aware of the arguments made by those you don’t agree with, and so won’t have an accurate and fair understanding of them.

3. If you only ever hear ideas and arguments from people you already agree with, the picture you have of the state of the world will lack veracity. It will be distorted, and it’s important that our view of reality be accurate.

4. If you’re only interacting with people you agree with, you won’t be in a position to persuade those you don’t.

5. It’s easier to double-down on hatred of the other if you never interact with them, and so never have your stereotypes challenged.

All five of these are true, to one degree or another. The question is whether they apply to Bluesky, or any other ideologically and culturally aligned space, and, if they do, whether they are severe enough to justify either not using such platform, or using them but intentionally following some critical mass of people aligned in ideological opposition to you.

I think they don’t, in the sense that I think there’s nothing wrong with spending most of your social media time, if you don’t count yourself as belonging to the political right, in a place like Bluesky, and there’s nothing wrong with, for example, not following a bunch of MAGA accounts while there. But why there’s nothing wrong with either has a lot to do with how we think about social media platforms.

Let’s start with a simple observation. While we have hand-wringing conversations about “echo chambers” when it comes to social media, we don’t tend to have them about other spaces. If you belong to a church, chances are everyone in that community shares a common set of religious beliefs—and we don’t argue that the lack of strong atheist or Muslim representation in a Catholic congregation makes it an echo chamber. If you work at a non-profit advancing abortion rights, you probably haven’t hired many people who oppose reproductive freedom, but that doesn’t make your workplace an echo chamber—or at least not the kind of echo chamber we raise the above five concerns about. If you hang out a lot in an online discussion forum dedicated to Star Wars, we don’t call it an echo chamber because it lacks a ton of Trekkies.

Why the difference? Because we recognize that people belong to different communities, and communities are build around shared values and interests. Intellectual and ideological diversity matters, but inconsistently, and not all diversity is necessary, or necessarily good. A medical school should have instructors with different perspectives where those perspectives represent meaningful positions within the medical community, but it probably shouldn’t have instructors who reject the germ theory of disease.

We also recognize that people are aware that each of the communities they exist in—and most of us exist in many, sometimes overlapping and sometimes not—are not representative of the whole. You can be in a knitting club without believing that everyone in the world is an into knitting as you are. You can belong to a Buddhist sangha while being perfectly aware that most people aren’t Buddhist. In fact, the reason you seek out these communities in the first place is because they’re unrepresentative. If everyone you encountered was already into these things, you wouldn’t need to join a community dedicated them. You’d always already be in one.

In cases outside the context of social media, we largely understand this. But social media has a weird structure that tricks our brain in a particularly pernicious way:

What this means in practice is that the risk of social media ideological uniformity isn’t the uniformity itself, but that social media leads us into believing that uniformity is representative of the whole. An echo chamber is really only an echo chamber if you’re unaware of it. Otherwise, it’s just a group of people you enjoy having conversations with.

In the context of whether Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon, or any other non-Twitter/X platform is an echo chamber, then, what really matters isn’t that there aren’t a ton of MAGA people there saying MAGA things. What matters is how the members of the Bluesky, Threads, or Mastodon communities view those communities on Bluesky, Threads, and Mastodon. Are they getting tricked in the way described above?

We can’t answer that with perfect certainty, and the answer’s going to vary from person to person, but the fragmentation of social media that happened when Musk took over Twitter cuts against it. People who left Twitter for smaller platforms are, in my experience, quite aware of how unrepresentative those new platforms are. They’re not getting tricked, because they conceptually understand the platforms to be closer to web forums than the “center of culture and the home of the discourse” view many once held about Twitter.

Isn’t it bad if people are using social media to talk about politics, but only hearing one side? Yes, it’s bad if they are entirely unaware of views contrary to their own or if their only interactions, ever, are with their narrow tribe. But it’s unrealistic to think that’s the case with a place like Bluesky. Politically engaged people there live in a country where half the population voted for Trump, and in a media environment saturated with right-wing and center-right perspectives.

Further, it’s unlikely they’re going to learn anything new about the subtle points of pro-MAGA philosophy from the kinds of people who get readily blocked on Bluesky. As I wrote in a post over there recently, “Most people's arguments are not novel, nor are they the most interesting version of those arguments. But most people who make arguments think otherwise. So they think when you block them, you're failing to see their novel and interesting takes, when instead you're just blocking low value repetition.”

Ultimately, then, there’s nothing inherently wrong with spending most of your time in an online space populated largely by people who actually want to be around. We all spend a great deal of our time in spaces populated largely by people we actually want to be around—and if we don’t, we’re actively seeking those spaces out. So long as we remain aware of how unrepresentative our various spaces are, and, when we engage with people outside our information bubble, we understand them clearly and fairly (instead of through distorted pictures of them internal to our own ideological group), we’re not in an echo chamber, but instead merely in a community that makes us happy. And there’s nothing wrong with that.