Ministry of Health leaving X for a dying platform full of furries and CSAM
Change my mind
The New Zealand public service is a law unto itself. As someone remarked on X today, the Coalition might be in Government, but they are not in power.
One small, but significant way our ministries, departments, and agencies are registering their defiance and hatred of people outside of their echo chamber is by shutting down (or reducing) their X accounts in favour of alternatives like BlueSky.
X has become viewed as low status value in the eyes of our ‘cultural elites’. Only far right bigots and low-brow morons use it, they say. Elon Musk and his association with Donald Trump have made the platform unusable for them for the same reason their political counterparts overseas are selling their Teslas. On the other hand, joining Bluesky is a way to signal that one is a ‘high-value’ progressive who wants to use a social media platform that restricts “hate” speech.
Today, the Ministry of Health let its 48,000 X followers know that they would be “reducing” their posting on X. Instead they will be using Facebook, Linkedin, and their new Bluesky account.
Facebook is great if you want to connect with an older audience and Linkedin works for the corporate workers, but BlueSky is a newish platform with a CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) problem and a declining user base. What on earth would possess the Ministry of Health to shut up shop on X where they can reach an existing audience of 48,000 to post on a site where they have 154 followers?
Politics, my friends. Politics. Our public service is meant to be neutral, but it is mostly based in Wellington which went Green at the election when the rest of the country went to the right. The Government has had to deal with leak after leak from white-anting bureaucrats who see themselves as avenging angels working from within to take down the evil Tory Government. They don’t bother themselves with the trifling matter of principles of neutrality and bipartisanship. That is such an old fashioned way to approach public service. Nowadays, the public servants choose the kind of Government the country gets, not the voters.
I have made an Official Information Act request to see if I can understand how the ministry came to their decision regarding BlueSky, but I won’t get a response for some time. However, if we assume that the Ministry of Health use their social media primarily to inform New Zealanders of public health messages and that in order to do so they would want to reach as many New Zealanders as possible, this decision looks very strange indeed.
You would think that a decision to move to a new platform would be based on that platform providing access to new audiences or a larger number of New Zealanders. That is simply not the case for BlueSky. In fact, times are tough over at the young social media platform. Its own statistics are not pretty. After a large spike in traffic and engagement at the end of last year, the trends are all heading downhill.
It seems unlikely that the platform is going to provide the Ministry of Health with much growth in terms of audience. So what else could have driven this decision? Perhaps it is about behaviour and the type of person the managers of the ministry’s social accounts are trying to avoid encountering. After all, 58% of X users are under 35, 1 in 5 are American, and there is a ratio of two males to every female.1 There was plenty of discourse around leaving the “toxicity” of X to the more progressive and civilised BlueSky.2
The grass certainly looked greener over at BlueSky for the many American progressives, and their sympathisers around the world, who were infuriated at the 2024 election result. Unfortunately for them, as is often the case, the grass was not greener. It was artificial.
It turns out all of the pedos, furries, and antifa crowd created the same problems on BlueSky as they create everywhere. But at least it they were away from the “toxic masculinity” of X, right? Well, no. Around one-third of BlueSky users are 18 to 24 years old, over 60% are male, and around 2 in 5 are American.3
So why did our Ministry of Health want to leave behind a substantial following to start anew on a dying platform full of weirdos?
The answer, I suspect, is simple. The social media team are virtue signalling. Anecdotally, it seems that New Zealanders using BlueSky are disproportionately likely to be public servants. I do not have statistics for that, but I have observed a lot of the Wellington cancel crowd heading over there.
It is about showing moral purity and intellectual superiority. It is saying we are far above the scum on X. As I have shown their assessment is well off as the toxicity is present elsewhere, as are the same (male-dominated) audiences. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is the perception. They can tell their public servant friends that they have taken action in a meaningful anti-Trump way. They have taken a stand. They don’t care if the annoying bigoted Tory minister will be pissed off, they have made the call.
I was Googling around and I found a blog written by a comms professional of some kind called Seamus. His commentary is rather reactionary and typically anti-Musk, but he has summarised that:
It’s official: councils have given up on Twitter/X. In 2023, 17 councils left the platform, joining a further 13 who gave up on it over the previous 4 years.
Which means that as of today, just 13 councils out of 78 are regularly using X, and to be honest a lot of that use is half-hearted dump-and-run stuff presumably out of habit or to tick a box somewhere.
For government departments, 12 of 31 are still regularly using X, but over the course of last year 8 abandoned the platform, including Corrections and MSD, as well as other big agencies like ACC.4
Now, as a communications professional myself, I question the need for most Government departments to operate as extensively as they do on social media. It would save us a lot of money if we no longer needed social media teams of 10 or 12 people per department. I think one person ensuring equitable access to information online would suffice. We certainly don’t need ‘relatable’ cat memes and inside terminally-online jokes. However, if we do persist with social media, it should be addressing objectives and serving specific purposes. Are all of the government departments who have stopped using X still reaching the audiences they need to? Could they reach more if they were still on X? How much resources have been dedicated to building new audiences because the staff didn’t like the one they had at X?
Sadly, this disregard for the purpose of the Ministry of Health looks very similar to how they give zero shits about their women’s health messages reaching the audience it needs to. They would rather use right-on ‘woke’ language that erases sex from the comms than make their communication easier for the less-educated or new-to-English women who don’t understand what “people with a cervix” means.
Political virtue signalling matters most. Bugger the rest.
https://explodingtopics.com/blog/x-user-stats
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8dm0ljg4y6o
https://explodingtopics.com/blog/bluesky-users?
https://www.seamus.nz/resources/thinking-of-ditching-x-make-sure-to-think-it-through
Yes the Govt Dept I work for has left X. And yes my experience clearly shows me that in my world we are totally running forward on the plans (based on radical progressive assumptions not evidence) developed under Labour are continuing to steamroll along. The only thing creating a few wobbles is the 7% claw backs on budgets. I think only by getting a 2nd or 3rd term will some change start to occur.
Wellington needs to have a massive depression causes by retaining only 10% of the core public service. They are nor merely malevolent. They are incompetent and wasteful. In this economic environment, we cannot afford to have employees who are wasteful, incompetent or malevolent.