Twitter Is Frying Your Brain

Scroll Matt Yglesias’ Bluesky feed and you’ll see scant activity from one of the Democratic Party’s most online bootlickers, and the majority of his posts are very clearly trollishly designed to make people on Bluesky yell at him while positioning himself as the preeminent Bluesky expert. Nate Silver doesn’t even have a Bluesky account, yet apparently knows everything about the site. It’s obvious that this Twitter discourse around Bluesky is just people inventing a guy in their head to get mad at, created in the image of the people in their replies telling them to eat shit, and extrapolating it to all of Bluesky.

Since Michael turned off replies and quote tweets, like any good journalist seeking the truth would, I’ll point out that people like him, Nate Silver, Matt Yglesias, etc. say shit like this as cover for the fact that THEY DO NOT SUPPORT THE POLICY AND THEY WANT IT TO FAIL.

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— “Captain” “Ruck” “Cohlchez” (@captainruck.bsky.social) September 1, 2025 at 10:17 PM

No one ran on defund the police in 2024, let alone in 2020. This firmly held belief among reactionary centrists that “defund the police” animates the left side of the Democratic Party and somehow cost Democrats in 2024 but not 2020 is just further proof of what willing marks they are for debunked right-wing propaganda. If anyone uses this phrase to talk about why the left annoys them or whatever, just give them that Politifact link to things candidates said in 2020 that were not “defund the police,” and know that you can stop taking them seriously.

Lakshya Jain is the only part of this Bluesky hating abundance brigade that has earnestly tried to engage with Bluesky. To my read, he is perhaps the only abundance guy (and most of them are guys) who isn’t a full-blown reactionary willing to talk to race-science enthusiasts like Richard Hanania yet unwilling to post on Bluesky. This makes Jayn the perfect example to use of how simply sitting in Twitter’s toxic stew can melt otherwise reasonable brains, and turn you into a raving lunatic who looks far more like an Elon Musk reply guy than any of the four in five Americans who don’t use the MechaHitler site. Not only did he willingly write the below posts, but Jayn also seems to think that “Biden was extremely weak and trying to run him again was a catastrophe” is something 80 percent of Bluesky disagrees with. I’m not sure there’s a sample you could take of people in America, even within Biden’s own family, where 80 percent would disagree with that statement.

Excuse me? Peter Thiel’s lapdog wouldn’t “try to chuck out every democratic principle ever”??? What evidence does the data man have for this assertion? Vance said in 2021 that he wanted to give more votes to parents than non-parents. He has criticized the left for being “people without kids” and he uses parents and right-wingers almost interchangeably in his vernacular. What do you think the “childless cat lady” guy means by wanting to give more votes to parents? He is also the vice president of an administration overturning the law, explicitly representing the Silicon Valley technofascist GOP wing who worships one of America’s most underwhelming thinkers whose entire philosophy is that we should have a CEO King. In what world does Donald Trump’s Veep, a man obsessed with controlling women’s bodies, get any kind of credibility as a small-d democrat?

Well, if you are cooking your brain on the MechaHitler site filled with little JD Vances all day, that would be one way you could come to the conclusion that the second-in-charge in the constitution destroying presidency is not pro-constitution destroying. All these people smugly talking about avoiding the Bluesky woke outbreak as they drink from Twitter’s radioactive Nazi firehose are not doing the Very Smart and Savvy shtick they think they are. They’re jumping out of a bike lane and on to an interstate highway, then lecturing us about how dangerous standing in the bike lane is while claiming they can reason with the semi-truck of sewage barreling down on them at 75 mph.

I went after The Argument’s editor-in-chief Jersualem Demsas last week for a really poor defense of staying on Twitter, and to her credit, she faced the Bluesky critics head-on and then published a back and forth she had with Adam Gurri, editor-in-chief of Liberal Currents, who did a good job articulating the widespread critiques with her logic without being a jerk about it. For people who try to operate in some level of good faith like Demsas and Jain, unlike Yglesias and Silver, this seems to be an argument about how powerful their inner debate club kid is. Writing as a former Model UN nerd still upset over sleights from my childhood (if you were one of the judges who gave a human rights award to the kid representing China, know that part of me still hates you), I sympathize with this line of thought, but ultimately, it is a delusional one that is completely wrapped up in your own ego.

You are not more powerful than Twitter’s algorithm. Elon Musk is putting his finger on the scale in favor of 18th century race scientists like JD Vance’s circle of white nationalist friends, and your Very Reasonable Centrism is not seeing anywhere near as many people as your follower count makes you think it is. Splinter had about 850,000 followers when we took over the account last March, and it currently has dwindled to 474,600 followers. We auto-post every article there as it goes up, but otherwise are inactive. Even as our Bluesky traffic has fallen 17.7 percent in the last 90 days alongside our Google traffic cratering along with everyone else’s thanks to these AI summaries, it’s still the 7th largest driver of traffic to Splinter. The MechaHitler site is 20th. We get more traffic from you guys arguing in the comments with each other than we do from the supposed town square of the internet. I watched engagement on our Twitter account get nuked in the weeks after the assassination attempt on Trump, and it has constantly fallen since.

If you are still on Twitter, know that it has warped your brain in ways you cannot see but the rest of us can, all so you can scream into the void that Musk has curated specifically for liberal posts. Elon turning Grok into MechaHitler was an instructive moment, because if that’s what he’s doing out in the open with Grok’s algorithm, what do you think he’s doing to the much more subtle Twitter algorithm? Demsas talks about how TikTok also boosts right-wing content in her unconvincing rebuttal to Girri’s point that Twitter doesn’t even provide the engagement the “debate me” centrists crave, but this is an apples to oranges comparison. Elon Musk is very explicitly a Nazi—he made two Nazi salutes behind the podium at the presidential inauguration, and he deliberately trained an LLM on his posts and it concluded that it now was MechaHitler—there is no doubt that he is tweaking Twitter’s algorithm to boost Nazi talking points while shielding thoughts to its left. Debate club kids like Demsas can argue all they want that they’re supposedly providing a public service by counterprogramming Elon, but Elon determines who sees their posts, not them. And as Lakshya Jain so helpfully demonstrates in his ‘you gotta hand it to JD Vance’ missive, the algorithm’s impact on reactionary centrists is far greater than their impact on the algorithm.