Ben Franklin Would Have Loved Bluesky

We have entered the chaos era of social media in America. Sociologists would call it a “legitimation crisis”: It’s what happens when people lose faith in social institutions during periods of rapid change, including, crucially, institutions devoted to communication. Consider the lightning-fast transformation of Twitter, where six months ago journalists from national newspapers were trading barbs with politicians and experts, and today CEO Elon Musk changes the site’s rules on a whim, often making it impossible to know who is a legitimate source and who is an impostor.

Twitter isn’t the only social-media platform undergoing a vertiginous shift. Meta has laid off thousands of workers in the aftermath of profit declines and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s obsession with creating a “metaverse” in virtual reality. Newer social-media apps such as Hive Social seem to wink out as quickly as they arrive, and the newsletter platform Substack recently launched a Twitter clone called Notes, which is already earning bad reviews for its moderation policies. Meanwhile, Congress has banned government employees from using TikTok on workplace devices, and is mulling a national ban for all other citizens too.

Jürgen Habermas, the German philosopher who coined the term , also had a framework for how such calamity might be averted. One way is to rebuild trust in institutions by creating a stable, democratic public sphere where open communication is possible. We’ve learned the hard