By Alex Kirshner

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July 14, 202612:19 PM

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It should now be well established that Elon Musk has turned Twitter into a right-wing fever dream in which Democrats rarely win elections legitimately, Donald Trump is popular, and good, red-blooded Americans have bailed on the Democratic Party. But in the now-aborted Senate campaign of Graham Platner, we got a window into how the platform also serves as a reality distortion field for Democrats. 

Musk’s capture of Twitter and subsequent transformation of the platform were, on net, a gift to Republicans. The platform was (and likely still is) much smaller than Instagram or TikTok, but its station as the dominant social media app for journalists and political elites gave it agenda-setting power. Its seizure by the richest person in the world, who now reasonably appears to be a white supremacist, has probably helped pull our politics to the right. If you scrolled around the algorithmic feed that is currently the default option when someone opens the X app, you would probably see how Musk’s team is mainlining far-right antisemites like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens into your feed.

Over the past year, X contributed to a different sort of havoc within the Democratic Party. The Platner campaign was a good backdrop for a social media civil war not on the right but on the left. The home base of Platner’s online support was X. Meanwhile, the home base of Democrats who hated Platner was Bluesky, the far-smaller microblogging hub that I think is well intentioned if a bit too boring and that others see as a hub for humorless scolds who make each other mad all day. (Both can be true.) In broad strokes, Bluesky Democrats abhorred Platner after learning he once had a Nazi tattoo and that he had posted like an evil doofus on Reddit and also sexted with women who were not his wife. Twitter Democrats stuck by Platner, believing that he was a good avatar for working-class politics and that real voters wouldn’t care that he was rough around the edges. Moreover, these supporters thought that their Democratic counterparts on Bluesky were doing Chuck Schumer’s bidding, coming down on Platner because he was the only candidate in the race willing to label Israel’s atrocities in Palestine a genocide and suggest that we should all stop financing it.

What happened in the end was a lesson in many things, first among them whether people whose honesty is questionable on one or two topics can be trusted on anything else. (No, I’d say, after a credible rape allegation pushed Platner out of the race.) Platner’s downfall was also a case study in how online support for candidates can snowball in weird ways on the Musk-owned X. While that phenomenon is more obvious and arguably more harmful on the right, Democrats have demonstrated they are not immune.

It might just be that I spend a bit more time on Bluesky than X nowadays, but not trusting Platner seemed reasonable enough to me. The guy had a Nazi tattoo and wrote many posts that suggested he was at best a poor representative for populist politics and at worst a pathological liar who did not respect women, Black people, or Jews. Although it was uncomfortable to say so because it meant siding with “the establishment,” Platner had exhibited hallmarks of being a shitty guy and a political liability. But on X, coming out against him was a signifier of one of two things: Either the person doing it was a neoliberal hack with no interest in winning elections, or had such bad political instincts that they weren’t worth taking seriously.

“I can’t remember the last time there was such a giant disconnect over a candidate between online (mostly BlueSky) Dems and Democratic voters,” Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau wrote in March.

“The way Bluesky posts about Graham Platner is on a level of derangement only matched by Flat Earthers,” the author Eoin Higgins said.

“Bluesky HATES Graham Platner. It’s hilarious,” antitrust hawk Matt Stoller wrote.

These points struck me as a buildout from a school of thought Nate Silver advanced in 2025: that “Blueskyism” is an insular, performative clique within Democratic politics. Fair enough, but the corollary of that case is that the platform Bluesky exists to counter, X, is somehow a more authentic representation of the world.

Social media platforms are all, to some extent, their own little bubbles. No one has yet curated the perfect user base or algorithm to map people’s feeds exactly onto the preferences of the country, or even Maine primary voters. But what happened on X around Platner was something different. In a fractured party where some of the loudest online voices had left for a different platform, a lot of people who remained on Musk’s platform were sure that they were the ones who had the story straight. Not only were they sure of it, but they thought their choice of microblogging app had helped them see things more clearly. These people made the curious mistake of forgetting that Elon Musk’s social media platform, one in which any criticism of legitimately bad behavior is liable to be painted as “wokeness,” may also not be representative.

“I gather that everyone here is 100% certain Graham Platner is a Nazi antisemite,” the left-wing journalist Ryan Grim wrote on Bluesky in early March. “I also gather you all are trapped in an epistemic chamber sealed tighter than the one around Fox News.” To be fair to Grim, Maine primary voters were with Platner, too, backing him by a wide enough margin that his main opponent, Gov. Janet Mills, quit before the July primary. But in the end, it turned out that Platner’s haters who had decamped to Bluesky had the right read on him—not that he couldn’t win votes because of the tattoo or extramarital sexts, but that a guy with these résumé marks was full of shit when he claimed that more stories weren’t coming.

(Am I suggesting that Democratic campaigns adopt an unquestioning strategy of doing whatever would be popular on Bluesky? God no. But there may, it turns out, be some utility to spending time on a platform where people are loudly opposed to anyone who’s ever had a totenkopf on their body. You may be likelier to retain basic rules about human character than if you spend your time in Musk’s sandbox.)

The Platner story is a little bit different, and a little bit lower-stakes, than the distortion X has wrought on Republican politics. When the Platner rape allegation came to light, his backing on X evaporated quickly. “Bluesky apology forms” even began to circulate among lefties with a sense of humor and self-effacement. There is no such introspection when reality does not turn out to match what conservative X posters spend all day sharing with one another. That was the main lesson from Spencer Pratt’s failed campaign to reach the general election for mayor of Los Angeles: Pratt and his supporters thought retweets on A.I.-generated videos were tantamount to actual votes, so they were shocked when the Angeleno electorate did not match the fun-house mirror Musk had built for them. Instead of grappling with that, the Republican Party, all the way up to President Donald Trump, spent days in a meltdown over imaginary election fraud. Those dreams were easier to conjure than the idea that a Republican candidate with no experience or union support could lose an election in one of the bluest cities in the country in a likely blue-wave year. Such is the extent of the hold X has on these people’s minds.

All of this is a horror show for our body politic. There is no real silver lining, but it should at least imbue a little bit of wisdom in Democratic campaign operatives and politicians. Somehow, through years of spending every waking moment on Twitter, then X, these people have carried away the impression that anyone who leaves Musk’s site is more liable than them to have lost touch with reality. That’s a foolish interpretation. Every social media platform is awful, but only one of them is Elon Musk’s personal toy. If I were on patrol to figure out where online subcultures were diverging from political reality, I’d start there. And if the conventional wisdom about a candidate is a lot friendlier on that platform than on a competitor’s, I’d spend some extra time interrogating why that might be happening. Just look at Pratt or, now, Platner.

Update, July 14, 2026: This article has been updated to provide additional context for several social media posts discussed in the piece.