The Dark Appeal of Social Media: Examining User Engagement

Since the U.S. election last month, Bluesky – which describes itself as ‘social media as it should be’ – has gained a lot of traction. They now have more than 24 million users, and traffic on the site is up 500% in the United States in the last month.

Many users have fled there from X (formerly Twitter) which has seen a sharp decline since Elon Musk bought the platform in 2022. The frequency of bots, partisan advertisements and harassment are often cited as reasons for leaving the social media platform.

Ed Zitron is a tech journalist who hosts the podcast Better Offline, and writes the newsletter Where's Your Ed At.

He talks to host Jayme Poisson about the rise of Bluesky, what differentiates it from X, and what this all means for the future of social media.

For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts