Millions of progressives have recently fled the social media platform Twitter for another social media platform, Bluesky, where there are fewer conservatives, and most users are progressives. On Bluesky, progressives gloated about the murder of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, who was killed today in Manhattan. “The deluge of support I am seeing over there for murdering health insurance executives is depraved and disgusting. Taylor Lorenz is already targeting other CEOs. Lunatics,” noted a prominent economist, Brian Riedl. The New York Post reported that journalist “Taylor Lorenz defends United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s murder in sickening post” on Bluesky.
Twitter’s “userbase is a nearly even split between 48% of Democrat users and 47% of Republican users,” according to the Pew Research Center. The percentage of Democrats on Twitter has fallen from 65% in 2022 to just under 50% today, leaving some progressives uncomfortable in a space where they no longer heavily outnumber conservatives.
Bluesky users claim they left Twitter not because of a desire for ideological conformity or an “echo chamber,” but because they want to avoid extremists and people who approve of violence, such as “Nazis, trolls, and fascists.”
But Bluesky has many extremists who approve of violence, such as the popular Bluesky user “Puff the Magic Hater,” who has tens of thousands of followers. A far higher percentage of Bluesky users than Twitter users are tankies or other left-wing extremists who condone violence.
For example, Puff the Magic Hater celebrated the murder of a company CEO, writing, “Omg fuck the hand-wringing about people not finding the murder of the UHC CEO tragic. No, actually, we don’t have to mourn the deaths of people who oversee the denial of our medical needs…all bc of their greed. STFU already.” “We are talking about someone who made massive profits…We are talking about greed and human disposability at scale. We are talking about a class enemy…We are not meant to mourn for such people,” she said. She added, “There are a bunch of folks talking about dude being a murderer, but we are talking about something more extreme than that. I work with imprisoned people. Plenty of people commit acts of violence whose deaths I would not celebrate. This is about something much bigger and deeper than that.”
Many Bluesky users celebrated the violence along with Puff the Magic Hater, such as Bluesky user “pussyfullawasps 🗡️ abolish prisons free 🇵🇸 fuck the police“, who thanked Puff the Magic Hater, writing, “snaps all around, thank you for putting words to this truth.”
Many Bluesky users reposted Puff the Magic Hater gloating about the CEO’s death. That includes Saeed Jones, who has over 100,000 Bluesky followers.
Bluesky progressives claim they need to be on Bluesky rather than Twitter to block “Nazis, trolls, and fascists,” but the people they block on Bluesky are often normal, civil, centrist people with viewpoints shared by most Americans. A respected law professor was blocked by many Bluesky users for gently criticizing Joe Biden’s pardon of Hunter Biden. That professor has also often criticized Trump — he co-founded the group Checks and Balances, which often criticized Trump — but the moment he criticized Biden, he got blocked by many Bluesky users. They would not tolerate any deviation from the Democratic party line.
As the economist Brian Riedl points out, many Bluesky users were happy about the murder of the CEO and gleeful over the prospect of additional killings:
