Don’t Say a Word - We’re Already Blocking

It was a debut both expected - and algorithmically assisted. No sooner had U.S. Vice President JD Vance logged into the delicately coded world of Bluesky on June 18, 2025, than he had done it: Within a few days, he became the most blocked person in the platform’s history. More than 111,000 people collectively clicked “Block.” And that’s more than just a digital shrug. It’s political poetry in a postmodern key - a canon of silence against the loud. Bluesky, that network with the soul of a better internet, was once the antithesis to Elon Musk’s X - a place for leftist memes, queer joy, and moderation with backbone. Since Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory, Bluesky has become a sort of digital diaspora for many - the last bastion of irony before the new era’s gravity. Between meme wars and muesli sarcasm, users were mostly looking for one thing: peace from the culture war. And then came Vance.

“I’m looking forward to sensible discussions with all of you,” he wrote in his first post - a sentence straight from an AI politician’s manual. But the feigned harmlessness didn’t last long. In just his second post, Vance praised the Supreme Court ruling that denied trans children in Tennessee access to medical treatment. He called Clarence Thomas’s opinion “illuminating” and ranted about “Big Pharma” allegedly “paying scientists to push medicine on kids.” The post was a mix of conspiracy, condescension, and political smokescreen - and the audience responded with the strongest form of digital dissent: the block button. Within twelve minutes, Vance’s account was initially suspended - the algorithm had mistakenly flagged him as a bot parodying itself. A short time later, the account was reinstated and verified. But by then, it was too late. The avalanche had already begun. And it wasn’t made of likes.

The record-breaking block even dethroned Jesse Singal, the journalist once considered the embodiment of debate fatigue. Vance surpassed him effortlessly - perhaps saying less about his own popularity than about social media’s shifting dynamics. Words that draw applause on X echo like slammed doors on Bluesky. It’s a phenomenon of our time: the same statements that get cheers on Truth Social provoke shame reflexes elsewhere. JD Vance entered Bluesky like a man walking into a vegan café to recite meat recipes. It wasn’t the wrong opinion - it was the wrong room. What remains is a micro-format PR disaster. A politician treating social media as a stage for strategic people-pleasing theater - suddenly performing to an empty house. Whether Vance stays on Bluesky remains uncertain. Perhaps he’ll return to X, where his audience is larger and his rhetoric more welcome. Maybe he’ll found his own platform - let’s call it “CommonSense.ly” - where no one blocks, because no one is there. In any case, JD Vance has accomplished something few others have: he went viral without being shared. A digital solo act that shows how political communication and public rejection can now be measured in real time - not by applause, but by collective indifference.