Remember when Bluesky was going to take over for X/Twitter? Now, the number of users on the platform has dropped precipitously — and the most prominent new user on the platform in quite some time took just 20 minutes and one post to get banned.
Vice President J.D. Vance joined the left-leaning platform Wednesday and focused on the big news of the day: namely, the fact that the Supreme Court had delivered a 6-3 vote in favor of states which banned transgender procedures for minors.
The court ruled that Tennessee was not enjoined under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause from prohibiting hormones, puberty blockers, and similar treatments being used on those under the age of 18.
“This case carries with it the weight of fierce scientific and policy debates about the safety, efficacy, and propriety of medical treatments in an evolving field,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion.
“The voices in these debates raise sincere concerns; the implications for all are profound. The Equal Protection Clause does not resolve these disagreements.”
“Nor does it afford us license to decide them as we see best,” he added.
Roberts was joined by Justices Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas. The court’s three liberals (Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor) rather predictably dissented. Sotomayor wrote in her dissent that the court’s ruling “does irrevocable damage to the Equal Protection Clause and invites legislatures to engage in discrimination by hiding blatant sex classifications in plain sight.”
Since that was the biggest news on Wednesday, Vance decided this was high time to see just how interested in polite discussion those on Bluesky were.
“Hello Bluesky, I’ve been told this app has become the place to go for common sense political discussion and analysis,” he wrote in his first post. “So I’m thrilled to be here to engage with all of you.”
Do you use Bluesky?
He pasted Justice Thomas’ concurrence where he questioned the wisdom of “deferring to the authority of the expert class.”
Among the arguments made by Thomas: “notwithstanding the alleged experts’ view that young children can provide informed consent to irreversible sex-transition treatments, whether such consent is possible is a question of medical ethics that States must decide for themselves” and “there are particularly good reasons to question the expert class here, as recent revelations suggest the leading voices in this area have relied on questionable evidence, and have allowed ideology to influence their medical guidance.”
Just set up my page on @bluesky, hope to see you guys there! pic.twitter.com/5cgjyMF8su
— JD Vance (@JDVance) June 18, 2025
Remember, Bluesky is supposed to be a Twitter alternative for everyone in the chattering class. Few people sit higher atop the right-wing of that class than Vice President Vance, the second-in-command in the White House and the de facto GOP presidential frontrunner in 2028.
But it still took him less than half an hour to be banned from the platform:
BREAKING: Bluesky banned VP JD Vance 20 minutes after he joined the platform https://t.co/IogKOGE1F0 pic.twitter.com/3k4pYWeiop
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) June 18, 2025
Vance got banned on Bluesky within 12 minutes of announcing on X that he was there
Update: the ban appears to have been reversed
He had posted a thread supporting Justice Thomas’s concurrence in the Supreme Court case upholding Tennessee’s law restricting transgender therapies https://t.co/xUV5dK0ug2
— Marc Caputo (@MarcACaputo) June 18, 2025
The New York Post noted that Vance’s “ban was brief, as the vice president’s account was reinstated just minutes later.” However, it’s telling that the sitting vice president of the United States, simply by pointing out what the law of the land was — and not in contravention of any of the platform’s guidelines — managed to get himself banned from the platform in less time than it takes most people to make pasta. And not just that, he was banned over bringing reality into the equation.
It’s also unclear whether or not this was activated by massive complaints from the progressive faithful still on Bluesky. One user said they’d “reported” Vance “for misinformation,” which I suppose is a counterintuitive thing until you realize that “misinformation” means “facts” in lefty land. “Don’t just block. Report the account and the posts,” another user said.
Perhaps this triggered some kind of algorithmic response from Bluesky. If it did, that speaks more to its unsuitability as a platform for serious discussion, since this is the kind of thing one would expect 10 years ago, when Occupy Democrats videos and BuzzFeed picture-listicles with titles like “41 Cats Who Definitely Know It’s Time for Happy Hour” were pretty much the stock in trade of microblogging sites — not now, when that kind of idiot-bait gets as much engagement as your aunt’s knitting photos.
But then, this is hardly a surprise. Notice anything about Bluesky’s user engagement chart?
Bluesky’s usage graph. The pattern here is bad. Spikes when a bunch of new people show up, followed by declines when the new arrivals are disappointed. pic.twitter.com/wESwWevXpw
— Paul Graham (@paulg) June 4, 2025
After a huge spike in the wake of the election and another on Inauguration Day, Bluesky has essentially been in a free fall. As Megan McArdle noted in a piece earlier this month, engagement is down 50 percent and steadily falling; most of the media personages who loudly announced their departure from X/Twitter during 2024 post irregularly, if at all, and “when that movement is organized by liberal groups, it’s most likely to appeal to folks who are very interested in progressive politics — which is to say, the other people who have already moved to Bluesky.”
And when someone from the other side politely shows up to share reality with the dwindling liberal anger-party, they apparently stop smashing each other for a second and begin smashing the vice president, completely unaware that this is why they keep losing.
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