The Yukon government switched from X to Bluesky. Other Canadian governments should do the same.
Twitter as we knew it is dead. It’s not an effective way of reaching your citizens.
In early April, the Yukon government announced that it would no longer be using X (formerly Twitter) in response to new US tariffs taking effect. Effective immediately, Yukon’s existing government X accounts notified followers that the accounts were no longer active and suggested that people follow the Yukon on other platforms for more recent information.
The Yukon government launched an official Bluesky account the same day. The account uses Bluesky’s domain name-based verification to confirm that it’s an official account. Several other Yukon government departments have also set up Bluesky accounts, along with pages on other social media networks. The switch made national news, alongside the Yukon’s other tariff response updates.
More effective tools for reaching citizens
Since Twitter was bought, its effectiveness as a platform has steadily declined. From the dismantling of trust and safety teams, to a dramatic increase in bots and spam, to user privacy concerns, the X platform is no longer a safe or pleasant place for everyday users.
More importantly, now that X requires visitors to log in to see multi-post threads, it’s not a reliable way for governments to communicate with their citizens. If, for example, the second or third posts in a thread about emergency responses or evacuations are only visible to logged-in X users – a frequent use-case for Twitter/X over the years – this presents an actual risk to citizens’ health and safety. That’s on top of X’s degraded ability to differentiate authentic versus fraudulent government accounts, and the possibility of deliberate algorithm changes making content less visible.
For time-sensitive updates from government departments, Bluesky or Mastodon are far better choices.
But the engagement numbers!
It’s understandable that government organizations and leaders are unsure about leaving X, given the prominent role that Twitter had in public communications for more than a decade.
It doesn’t help that, within X, organizations might still be seeing fairly high engagement numbers from their existing accounts and posts. My advice here would be: look at your web traffic, analytics, and user feedback from outside of X. See if anyone is actually arriving at your organization’s website from X, rather than trusting X’s engagement numbers.
In-platform engagement numbers have always seemed a little fishy; commercial social media platforms are heavily incentivized to tell you that your posts are popular. “Engagements” as a term conveniently blends together some artful combination of views, image views, likes or favourites, actual link clicks, and more, into some number that might not stand up to much scrutiny. As John Herrman writes,
Endowed with new powers of self-measurement, media companies, advertising firms, and online platforms have turned metrics into something approaching misinformation. They’re suspicious, context-free numbers, produced in private, selectively shared to tell just the right stories…
How long does someone have to glimpse a post to count? Doesn’t say. Do multiple views by the same user count? Yes. Are these numbers auditable or checkable in any way? Of course not.
For platforms in decline, it’s not a stretch to think that in-platform engagement numbers might be exaggerated (either within the platform’s analytics code, or through bot activity on the platform) to try to retain users.
All that to say: don’t use X’s in-platform engagement numbers to justify continuing to use X. Of course it will tell you that your account is popular.
People are here for it (switching away from X)
News coverage about Canadian government organizations (mostly municipal governments) switching from X to Bluesky has been consistently positive. Thus far, I haven’t seen any examples of Canadian citizens expressing unhappiness that their city or town or regional government has stopped using X.
After the Yukon government announced the switch from X to Bluesky (disclaimer: I work there!) I posted about it on Bluesky and Mastodon (an open-source Twitter alternative).
People were stoked. There’s nothing that Mastodon users love more than stories of people and organizations leaving X. 😜 (Even if they’re not moving to Mastodon!). To date it’s my most popular Mastodon post, not that, uh, engagement numbers are that important.
I’d love to see other Canadian jurisdictions and government organizations make the switch away from X, just like the Yukon did. Government organizations in the European Union are well ahead of us. With a little bit of prep, you can do it in a day. All it takes is public service and political leadership that’s willing to make it happen.