X, Mastodon and Bluesky: What earns attention?

• Social media platforms reward different types of engagement, significantly shaping political rhetoric and user behavior.
• X (formerly Twitter) favors aggressive and toxic discourse, while Bluesky and Mastodon show preferences for neutral, collaborative, or nuanced communication.
• Platform design and recommendation logic act as a "market" that influences how politicians present themselves and conduct policy.

Platform Differences in Content Performance

• Research by Petter Törnberg of the University of Amsterdam finds that while positive emotions and personal narratives earn "likes" across all three platforms, reach (shares/retweets) is incentivized differently:
• X: Positive and reasoned arguments are often penalized; insults, toxic behavior, and identity-based attacks correlate with higher reach.
• Bluesky: Neutral, less personal, and lower-emotion language tends to be more successful.
• Mastodon: Argumentation, nuance, and collective references are rewarded, whereas personal attacks and insults are generally disincentivized.

Architectural Influence on Discourse

• Unlike X, Mastodon and Bluesky rely less on engagement-based algorithmic rankings. Mastodon prioritizes chronological feeds and operates on a decentralized model, allowing instances to enforce specific moderation rules.
• The "Attention Economy" forces political actors toward conflict-driven messaging, as accurate, moderate descriptions are often "costly" in terms of visibility.
• This logic increasingly permeates beyond social media, influencing news media and the design of actual political measures.
• Törnberg argues that social media should be viewed as core democratic infrastructure, requiring governance and intentional design rather than reliance on a free-market approach to manage the distribution of societal attention.