The Big Threat to Twitter/X is Sports

Activists require the presence of hobbyists

I said that 80 percent of American politics is just who runs Twitter and a lot of you had the audacity to disagree. My statement is not without caveats, though. I think a major financial crash has the potential to cut through whatever Musk is trying to message. I also think the narrative centrality of Twitter/X, while fairly established, isn’t permanently assured. The question then is what, if anything, could unseat the dominant interest-driven network? I believe the answer to what might unspool X’s tight grip on political narrative pertains, oddly enough, to the habits of apolitical people. Sports fans, for instance.

Monday was the start of NFL Free Agency and Twitter/X started to glitch for many users. Musk has described what happened as resulting from a major cyber attack. NFL newsbreakers groused about the technical difficulties and, during periods of platform functionality, some football media personalities tweeted out their BlueSky accounts. A few of these pundits weren’t necessarily your stereotypical lib-coded BlueSky evangelists, either. As in, they were former players who appeared capable of a respectable bench press.

As I’ve detailed, there’s been a group of sports journalists who have tried, mostly in vain, to make BlueSky happen for ideological reasons. One measure of how this largely hasn’t worked as a movement is that the athletes themselves stayed on Twitter.

The large dog that’s not barking right now: Athletes. Perhaps a few have joined BlueSky, but I haven’t seen much movement. As sports journalists aggressively flock to BlueSky, the athletes appear unmotivated. You could argue that media trends precede athlete trends, but that’s not necessarily what happened with Twitter back in the day. Shaquille O’Neal’s early adoption of Twitter was what legitimized the platform to a lot of people. According to NBA writer and BlueSky adoptee Howard Beck, it’s why he signed up: An NBA journalist needed to see what NBA players were up to. In contrast, in this latest trend, we’re seeing sports journos go to a place where the athletes aren’t, hoping that perhaps the players follow.

The players stayed on Twitter because Twitter is where sports happen. Jocks care about their industries first, and don’t share many of the values broadcast by the nerds (descriptive, not pejorative) who cover them. They’re by and large more loyal to sports content than they are to the priorities of the Democratic party.

Many fans are similar to the players in that they are on this platform for entirely non political, sports-specific reasons. When there’s a shocker like the Luka Dončić trade, or some new NFL mega deal for an offensive lineman you’ve never heard of, this is where fans flock to keep current.

For the most part, Sports Twitter has trundled along as the sports media industry collapses around it. Even through Musk’s purchase, X marks the spot when a sport is in a state of present shock. I don’t expect this status quo to change, but Monday’s glitch was a reminder that Twitter’s sports dominance isn’t a rule of physics.

As I discussed with Katie Herzog, I largely haven’t seen a lot of what she and other political journalists are reacting to on Twitter/X in terms of liberal flight and right wing discourse. Some journos I follow will be talking about what “Twitter is like” right now but, I have to admit, it’s roughly the same experience for me as it was a year ago. I’m aware that insane people are getting traction with ventures like making Winston Churchill the true villain of World War 2, but, yes, my feed is mostly people reacting to how much Myles Garrett got paid.

I’m not saying that my user experience is good, bad, or even widely representative. I’m just saying that everyone’s experience is a mix of shared and individually tailored. There’s vast world of Twitter/X outside of conversations that revolve around DOGE or Ukraine or Andrew Tate. There’s sports, music, White Lotus. You know, interests on the interest-driven platform.

While Musk is perhaps less interested in the apolitical interest space, his site’s political power is connected to the bread and circus sphere. Paradoxical as it sounds, apolitical consumers are absolutely key to Twitter’s political power.

Why? Because the politics of the journalists who fled to BlueSky is largely fixed. These journos, activists and politicians might choose a Current Thing based on social media zeitgeist, but they aren’t switching ideological orientations or parties. Other consumers, including people who are on the platform primarily to check in on leisure topics, are potentially persuadable. Over time, with peripheral exposure to the site’s most popular narratives, the normie’s political norms can bend to the medium’s. It’s not dissimilar to how advertising works for sports on TV, only instead of getting hungry for Papa John’s, you might get a hankering for stricter border security or whatever.

One of the reasons I know this is because, over the last decade, I witnessed many otherwise sports-focused content creators and fans become increasingly political by medium osmosis. In the pre 2022 days, your Laker expert slowly becomes your expert on anti racism. Indeed, your Laker expert might lecture you on how anti racism wasn’t mere “politics,” but a matter of moral necessity.

This trend was all very tiresome and terrible, but, for awhile, politically useful to one side. I’ve written a lot about how and why sports specifically get used for activist purposes, but the main reason they’re valued ideological terrain is because they are, by and large, shared neutral spaces. The perception of sports as a neutral meeting ground is ironically what makes sports such an intensely powerful propaganda keep. If the sports space unifies around certain political messages, those messages don’t even read as politics anymore. It’s just what “we” all presumptively agree on.

Hopefully we’ll maintain a new status quo where sports are mostly compartmentalized from ideological messaging. Even still, the existence of Sports Twitter as a main watering hole for present-minded fans supplements the medium’s political importance. More bodies, more eyeballs, more consumers liable to pick up on perspective-altering messages outside of their main hobby.

Again, I don’t expect a few cyber attacks to end the centrality of X as America’s virtual sports bar. I’m just noting, during this moment of incredible cultural variance, that Twitter’s sway on our politics is at least somewhat dependent on its sway in realms fairly divorced from politics. I’m not sure that the personal is the political, but I happen to believe that the presence of hobbyists is necessary for the effectiveness of activists.