It is not a mass exodus, yet, but a growing number of artists, critics and the like are leaving the Meta platforms of Instagram and Facebook for the newer and seemingly neutral social media platform, Bluesky. Others are defecting from X (formerly Twitter), Elon Musk’s company and personal megaphone. Many cite the increasingly Trumpian, far-right positions of both Meta and X as reasons for leaving.

“I cannot stay on Facebook and Meta. Moved over to Bluesky and Substack,” Namita Gupta Wiggers, who has organised the popular group Critical Craft Forum on Facebook for years, posted at the end of January. “Join me on Bluesky where the air is clearer,” the artist and educator Annie Buckley wrote on Facebook and Instagram just a few days earlier.

Where the skies are blue

“If you would like to get our daily culture posts, follow us where the skies are blue,” the organisation Open Culture posted around the same time, the allusions to blue skies being attempts to ensure the posts were not suppressed.

The Mexico-born, Canada-based artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer explained his departure in a detailed Facebook post. “The Meta algorithm knowns I am a democratic socialist, always sharing, following and liking progressive content,” he wrote. “It has now started to send me pernicious and repeated right-wing posts, which it never did before. Folks, as we all know, Facebook was never neutral, but now its agenda for direct political manipulation is becoming more evident… and they are just getting started.”

“I’m not against a corporate platform,” Lozano-Hemmer tells The Art Newspaper, “but it’s so blatant that Musk and [Meta chief executive Mark] Zuckerberg are custodians of a radical understanding of what a society should be: a society where oligarchs and their objectives, to become trillionaires and fly to Mars, are uncontested.”

With over 30 million users in February (its one-year anniversary), Bluesky was originally developed by Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, as an in-house experiment in decentralising Twitter. It is now a public benefit corporation run by its chief executive Jay Graber, a biracial female software engineer. It is known for being moderated and giving users more control over their experiences, including a “nuclear block” to protect an account from trolls and prevent future contact.

The defections to Bluesky have escalated following Donald Trump’s re-election and his appointment of Musk as head of the “Department of Government Efficiency”. While Twitter under previous ownership had banned Trump from the platform for his fraudulent tweets, Musk welcomed him back on in 2022 and has been amplifying his comments and conspiracy theories. Overall usage of Bluesky grew by more than 500% in the weeks following last year’s US general election.

Meta has also lurched to the right politically in recent weeks. Not only did Meta donate $1m to Trump’s inauguration fund and Zuckerberg attend that ceremony alongside Musk, but in the interim he issued a revision to Meta’s hate-speech policies that bends to Trump’s evangelical base. The new policy prohibits “insults, including but not limited to allegations of cowardice, dishonesty, basic criminality and sexual promiscuity or other sexual immorality”, but makes an exception for LGBTQ people: “We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality.” (According to Section 230 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, internet companies in the US have the ability to censor certain types of speech on their sites but not the responsibility to do so, giving them great leeway to make up their own rules.)

Still, there is much less art-specific engagement on Bluesky than, say, Instagram, with the latter serving as the platform of choice for Los Angeles artists who were, for example, recently organising wildfire relief efforts. As the curator and art professor Alessandra Moctezuma (whose late husband was the leftist hero Mike Davis) points out: “I’m not sure it was that smart for folks to leave Facebook and Instagram at this crucial time when we need to share information.” She adds that Facebook is where she first saw coverage of the recent protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raids in California. “I appreciate those who chose to stay. We can use this to resist and organise.”

Given such concerns, it is not surprising that several prominent artists and critics—from Carolina Miranda and Hrag Vartanian to Nancy Baker Cahill and Marilyn Minter—are using multiple platforms along with Bluesky for the time being at least. Even Lozano-Hemmer predicts his migration to Bluesky will be gradual because he learned something about losing an online network from his sudden switch from Twitter (after Musk bought it) to Mastodon (a geekier, open-source site).

This time he is optimistic that more of his community will find its way to the new site. “At least half of my friends are moving to Bluesky,” he says. Facebook friends? “No,” he says. “Real-life friends.”