Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez takes swipe at X, praises ‘humanity’ of Bluesky amid return to rival app

As Twitter/X continues lurching to the right following the shock re-election of Donald Trump as US president, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – also known as AOC – is one of the high-profile names returning to rival platform Bluesky while firing shots at Elon Musk’s social media site.

AOC signed up to the decentralised social media platform (‘decentralised’ meaning that rather than users all having an account under one ‘centralised’ server, people can sign up to one of multiple different servers owned by other people) back in April last year, but began posting on the platform again on Monday.

And her comeback comes amid a post-election surge for Bluesky, with chief operating officer Rose Wang telling The Verge the same day that the site gained more than 700,000 new users in the last week alone – the “majority” coming from the US – taking their total number of users beyond 14.5 million.

It’s still a long way off from Instagram’s Threads, which has more than 275 million monthly users and tops the App Store in the ‘free social networking apps’ category.

Even so, a number of high-profile figures have confirmed they will be posting more on Bluesky going forward, with The Shape of Water filmmaker Guillermo del Toro and LBC broadcaster James O’Brien joining AOC in being more active on the butterfly app.

In a series of posts to Bluesky, the New York politician wrote: “I don’t even know why I stopped using this in the first place? Good GOD it’s nice to be in a digital space with other real human beings.

“Earnest post, but: a thing I like here is it’s okay to have moments of happiness in public without being broadly scolded, and I believe that sustaining this kind of humanity will be very important as we resist fascism.

“We have to sustain each other. Making joy isn’t denial, it’s how we survive.”

She also decided to “wait” on telling her Twitter/X users she was on Bluesky, stating that she doesn’t want to “inadvertently cause an influx of all the worst accounts on the internet”.

Case in point, as news of AOC’s posting on Bluesky reached X, users over there soon started attacking her posts, with one accusing her of spreading “lies and propaganda”, another joking that “the secret’s out” and Infowars host Harrison H. Smith writing the congresswoman is “having so much fun in her echo chamber”.

We can’t say we’re surprised…

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