From Tweet To Blues: Bundesliga’s Immigration Explained
On November 12th, the 47th U.S. President was confirmed, as Donald Trump won the election against Kamala Harris. The Republican candidate won 2 million votes more than his Democrat counterpart. Shortly after, the DOGE (Department Of Government Efficiency) was announced, a new Department. Two businessmen were nominated for the post: Vivek Ramaswamy and Twitter CEO Elon Musk.
A week later, several organizations left the platform. For football fans, the shocking news was to hear that Bundesliga clubs announced they were pulling out of the platform. First was St Pauli, famously a club with leftist positions, claiming that Elon Musk has turned the platform ‘into a hate machine’. It’s not only about Elon. The statement also quotes Trump’s elections as a reason, citing that ‘Donald Trump announced after his election victory that he would make Musk the head of a newly created government agency. Musk had already actively supported Trump during the election campaign, also with the help of X. It can be assumed that X is also promoting authoritarian, misanthropic and right-wing extremist content in the German federal election campaign and thus manipulating public discourse’.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz saw his coalition collapse two weeks ago, as internal disputes between his parties led to the dissolution of the ‘tricolour coalition’, forcing Scholz to call elections for February 2025.
St Pauli isn’t alone. Werder Bremen also announced its departure from the platform and invited its 600,000 fans to join the club on BlueSky. While Bremen used milder words, it still cited ‘increasing hate speech since Elon Musk’s arrival’ as a reason to leave Twitter.
German outlet BILD reported that other clubs in the Bundesliga are also considering the move, including Bayer Leverkusen, RB Leipzig, Hoffenheim, Augsburg and VfB Stuttgart. 2. Bundesliga club HSV also expressed similar concerns. In the meantime, HSV changed its banner to ‘Nazis Raus (Nazis Out). While these clubs haven’t left the platform (yet), the quoted reasons are similar — determining the impact of Elon Musk on elections and hate speech. It’s not only football clubs — The Guardian also announced it will stop posting on the platform, claiming that there is more harm in staying on Twitter — concerning the rise in hate speech.
One might ask — why are football clubs specifically leaving, and is it a good thing?
Since Elon Musk took over the platform, a few of his controversial policies led to a decrease in the app’s popularity. Elon Musk introduced paid checkmarks — the verification tick can be bought, for the low price of 11 dollars/month. The feature was first welcomed by many as Elon also introduced paychecks based on revenue sales. Users would get paid a small amount of Twitter’s ad revenue, based on the impressions their tweets produced.
Others, however, were worried about the possible consequences of this move. Under Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s previous owner, this was unthinkable. In the football sphere, it meant that unverified profiles post fake transfer news, and it resulted in fans disengaging in transfer news. With the verification tick becoming a simple transaction, the blue tick lost its meaning.
Furthermore, Elon Musk promised to allow free speech at all costs on the platform. He regularly talked about the ‘woke mind virus’, as he believed Jack Dorsey prioritized leftist views. Elon Musk allowed all forms of content, leading to more neo-nazis and an increase in hate speech on the platform. He cut the staff responsible for content moderation, leading to more harmful content being posted on Twitter without consequences.
Football Twitter experiences an increase in disinformation homophobia and misogynists. Where clubs like St.Pauli and Werder Bremen are right: The algorithm is worrying institutes across the world. The Queensland University of Technology (QUT) conducted a study earlier this week, which concluded that Elon Musk pushed the algorithm to push pro-Republican content this summer, ahead of the November US elections.
Why BlueSky?
BlueSky emerged as a platform in 2019, although it only rolled out in 2023. It was developed by Ex-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who started running it in parallel in 2019 to Twitter. It sells itself as an ad-free, decentralized version of Twitter. The algorithm and the design of the app are similar. The main difference is the transparency — which is another thing Werder Bremen requested from Twitter. BlueSky uses open-source protocols, which means that anyone can see the interior architecture of the app.
Jack Dorsey doesn’t run the app anymore — CEO Jay Graeber runs the platform. BlueSky experienced its first Twitter refugees in late 2023, as the app first rolled out with an invite-only system. Prospective users would be placed on a waitlist, and BlueSky would send an invite link…or not. A few months later, BlueSky rolled out to the larger public. While the site experienced a few immigrations from Twitter, the one following the US elections is the largest yet. BlueSky has over 20 million users as of today.
BlueSky still faces some challenges, such as the lack of verification tickets, but also of infrastructure. The app has had software issues as servers aren’t used to hosting as many users, although BlueSky is working on both issues.
If you’re looking to join BlueSky, you can find me on the same @ as on Twitter (jdeposicion).
