White House Invades Bluesky to Troll, Predictably Gets Mass Blocked

Bluesky is a social media platform of choice for liberals, leftists, progressives, woke people or whatever you want to call Donald Trump haters. When a bunch of Donald Trump-related accounts started using Bluesky earlier this weekend to incite a food fight, some were outraged or trolled, but Bluesky’s powerful blocking feature and cultural norms about ignoring right-wing trolls and harassers made their presence largely a non-issue.

On Friday afternoon, the Trump 2.0 White House account, @whitehouse-47.bsky.social, announced his momentous arrival by posting a vaguely triumphant repertory of clips that reference plenty of inside jokes for Republicans that probably don’t register to outsiders, such as a Joe Biden’s Autopen.

To make it clear that this was not meant to signal the sincere opening of a channel for information exchange between citizens and the head of the US federal government, the text of the post was a sarcastically cheerful provocation: “What’s up, Bluesky? We thought you might have missed some of our greatest hits, so we put it together for you. Can’t wait to spend more time together ❤️”

Answers from the Bluesky faithful included many Invoking Trump’s alleged connection to Jeffrey EpsteinAnd reference In the #NoKings movement.

But in most cases the account gets blocked. According to the Bluesky block tracking site Clearsky@whitehouse-47.bsky.social is already Bluesky’s second most blocked account, just below Vice President JD Vance, who Joining the site in the summer and has since secured a sustained position at the top of the rankings.

The sections had similar introductory posts with the White House’s bid for attention State, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, tradeso called “war department,” and many other Cabinet departments and executive branch offices. Their posts and videos mostly just greeted Bluesky users and hinted at future dialogue in the same sarcastic tone as the initial White House post.

All accounts at this writing show hundreds of thousands of blocks in the past 24 hours—more blockers than followers in most cases. Some, eg Office of the Director of National IntelligenceAchieved their follower count below 1,000. Most spent the weekend posting, and receiving, platitudes Double digit repost count As users avoid taking the bait.

If the White House communications people who probably orchestrated all of this were hoping to be able to produce epic lib meltdown content, it’s doubtful that the largely muted response was worth their effort. Because blocking in Bluesky is public, obvious and Designed to be total. The embed will break. The reply chain will be broken. Further conflict, friction, and cognitive dissonance will suddenly cease. Blocker and blocker will essentially disappear from each other’s universe.

Bluesky’s blocking culture includes the use of block lists, one-stop-shopping to block all accounts in certain categories or groups with a single tap. Even, somewhat more controversially, there is at least one block list All users who interacted with the White House account Rather then simply blocking it. Many, many blocked nodes in the network weaken the network effect of posting on a platform, resulting in less engagement for a bunch of accounts associated with the most powerful person in the world.

Bluesky critics like Mark Cuban Call Bluesky an echo chamber, And it’s hard to argue that they’re completely wrong. But all the Trump White House set out to do this weekend in that echo chamber made a screeching noise, and since users were equipped with very effective earplugs, it wasn’t all that annoying.