The social media landscape is dominated by right wing ownership. Elon Musk and Mark Zukerberg are notably supportive of the Trump administration. Musk built X into a propaganda machine in support of Trump’s campaign, leveraging that support to gain control over the administration. Zuckerberg’s Meta (parent of Facebook, Threads, and Instagram) will officially end its fact checking system on Monday, April 7, 2025 likely leading to further erosion of an objective reality.

It’s odd that so many progressives still support those platforms. As an example, the Rogue Valley Indivisible page promoting the recent Hands Off protests shows links to Twitter and Facebook but provide no links to accounts on Bluesky (bsky.app). (At least the national Indivisible site links to Bluesky and Mastodon and eliminates X.) Perhaps their social media teams are not fully up-to-speed with newer platforms. It’s not just political groups that are still socializing in ways that profit Musk and Zuckerberg — I see that many arts organizations, too, are stuck in the old right-wing spaces. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival still favors Facebook, X, and Instagram. I know that they are faced with a challenge of reaching an audience in customary spaces, but increasingly those spaces (notably and particularly X) have grown so toxic that organizations like OSF may be tainted by association.

The Bluesky platform is a reference implementation of an open standard protocol. And the company, while privately held, is a B Corp:

Bluesky Social is a benefit corporation; as such, it is allowed to use its profits for the public good, and is not obligated to maximize shareholder value or return profits to its shareholders as dividends.
Wikipedia

Let’s work together to encourage organizations to stop helping these Trump supporting platforms: X, Facebook, Threads, and Instagram and instead move to a public benefit supported open standard platform like Bluesky.

Cliff Bentz is a devotee of Donald Trump and Elon Musk and has handed over to the Trump administration the responsibilities that rightfully fall to the Article 1 branch of government, Congress. He has shirked his constitutional duties and enabled a fascist takeover of the United States, preferring the devastation wreaked by Elon Musk’s firings and cuts to agencies and departments of government that provide services to citizens and the world. He also favors the massive tax increase on American citizens in the form of the crushing global tariffs imposed by Donald Trump. (Trump has been justifiably criticized by economists across the political spectrum for being disturbingly ignorant about how tariffs work. His administration couldn’t even come up with a meaningful method for determining the tariff rates to impose. And in an inexplicable act of stupidity, they also imposed tariffs on uninhabited islands and on US Military bases, while forgetting to impose any tariffs on Russia..)

Bentz has bragged about his unconditional support for Trump and Musk. He needs to go.

District 2 has been represented by a Republican since 1981, though some of those representatives have been moderates. Greg Walden, who was more of a center-right Republican than Bentz, served the district from 1999 to 2021. The time has come for either a moderate, sensible Republican or a moderate Democrat (like Democrat Al Ullman who was elected to represent the district 12 times from 1957 to 1981.)