Bluesky and X social media moves makes Parliament and courts look partisan – Jonathan Ayling
New Zealand's court system and Parliament have announced they will no longer use the social media platform X, with the courts choosing instead to use the less popular Bluesky.
THE FACTS
- New Zealand’s court system and Parliament have announced they will no longer use X (formerly Twitter) for social media messaging, with NZ Court’s opting instead for Bluesky.
- Globally, Bluesky has about 41.5 million users. X has about 600 million monthly users.
As a straight, Pākehā, Christian man, I never expected to be a “diversity hire”. But last year, in a sense, I was, when I was appointed to the Internet New Zealand board.
There, the fact that I see the world differently from many of my colleagues, bring different assumptions, and have different political instincts is not a liability to be managed. It is an asset.
We often talk about diversity in terms of sex, ethnicity, or culture, but these are really only proxies for something deeper: different life experiences, different instincts, and different ways of seeing the world. In short, intellectual diversity. Good decision-making depends on having people in the room who see the same question differently.
Nowhere is that more important than in the institutions of democratic government. That is why recent decisions by both the Office of the Clerk, on behalf of Parliament, and the New Zealand courts are so troubling.
This week, the court system announced it would no longer use X, formerly Twitter, to communicate with the public, inviting people, instead, to follow its new Bluesky account. Last month, the Office of the Clerk made a similar move for parliamentary material by announcing it would stop posting to X.
Bluesky is not widely understood as a neutral public square. It is generally seen as the more ideologically curated alternative, the platform preferred by those who found X too rough or insensitive to their progressive sensibilities. Where X has defined itself as the free-speech maximalist of the social media world, Bluesky is known to be its “woke counterpart”.
And that is the problem.
Neither institution felt it necessary to justify the decision, though it almost certainly comes down to a lack of content moderation on X and harmful content, including material generated by X’s AI bot, Grok (such as deepfakes).
These are serious problems. No serious person needs to pretend X is a model digital public square. But leaving X is one thing. Moving to Bluesky is another.
At the time of writing, the Courts of New Zealand Bluesky account has less than 1% of the followers the same account had on X. A report from last year indicated across the country, about 20% of the population are X users.
There were no reliable numbers for how many Kiwis use Bluesky. Some rough estimates say probably less than 2% of Kiwis are Bluesky users. Globally, the platform has only 41.5 million users. X has about 600 million monthly users.
Whatever the exact numbers, the broader point is plain: X reaches far more people than Bluesky, both in New Zealand and globally. Many New Zealanders have never even heard of Bluesky. Had Parliament and the courts simply decided that X was no longer worth the trouble, that might have been defended as a practical judgment.
But the courts shifting to Bluesky changes the meaning of the decision, or at least its appearance. And for institutions that rely so heavily on public legitimacy, that’s virtually the same thing.
There are few institutions more important in a democracy than Parliament and the courts. Their authority depends not only on acting impartially, but on being seen to act impartially. A mature institution should ask not only, “Can we justify this decision?” but also, “How will this look to the public we serve?”
That is why intellectual diversity matters so much. Not because every institution must flatter populist sentiment, bend to online outrage, or distribute equal approval to every platform and tribe. But because a narrow moral and cultural consensus inside an institution leads to narrow judgment outside it. People begin to mistake shared instinct for obvious truth. Decisions that feel merely prudent internally are then received externally as partisan gestures.
A healthy institution needs people in the room willing to say: Perhaps this seems obvious to us, how will others see it? What does it communicate to those who are already suspicious of the lanyard-wearing class? Have we counted the trust this may cost us, and what will that mean? I wonder whether, in either of these cases, anyone was capable of making the counterargument.
Even a defensible decision may still be a bad one, especially if it needlessly reinforces the growing perception that our most important institutions no longer understand, or even really wish to engage, large parts of the public. Whether anyone intended it or not, that is nonetheless the message many Kiwis will take from these decisions.
Parliament and the courts do not need to mirror every public opinion. But they do need enough breadth of mind, and enough intellectual diversity, to understand how their actions will be read by citizens beyond their own walls.
If we are going to make diversity hires, it should be because it helps institutions think broadly, and in doing so hopefully retain legitimacy. For all the ethnic, cultural, religious, or sexual diversity our public service emphasises, without intellectual diversity we still risk groupthink. Decisions may be well-intentioned. They may even be substantively defensible. But they will be narrower than they should be, and less legitimate than they need to be.
Frankly, I care little whether Parliament or the courts are on X. But I care immensely whether New Zealanders feel represented by their democratic institutions and able to trust their judgment. If those institutions remain indifferent to the way many Kiwis now see them, they will forfeit legitimacy. And we will all bear that cost.
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