The White House 🏠 Joins Bluesky: What’s the Buzz? 🤔

The Trump administration is taking its social media attacks on Democratic opponents to an unlikely platform, with the White House and numerous other government agencies joining Bluesky on Friday.

In its first post, the new White House account uploaded a highlight reel of Trump footage and memes, along with the message, “What’s up, Bluesky? We thought you might’ve missed some of our greatest hits, so we put this together for you.”

Other government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Transportation, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of State, the Department of War, and the Department of Transportation all appeared to follow the White House by creating new Bluesky accounts, and all of them quickly posted messages attacking Democrats over the ongoing government shutdown.

“We heard this is a great place to have an open and honest dialogue, so we’re here to talk about how the Democrat shutdown is undermining our country on the world stage,” wrote the Department of State. (Legal experts have suggested that similar statements from government agencies likely violate the Hatch Act.)

The messages were generally written in a cheerful, trolling tone, suggesting that the administration’s social media teams were anticipating and even hoping for a negative response on a social network that’s widely known as a left-leaning alternative to Elon Musk’s X. And Bluesky users delivered, with many responses to the initial White House post bringing up Trump’s relationship with infamous sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

“The reason they’re coming after this place is because they can’t control the people on it and it drives them nuts,” wrote The Onion CEO Ben Collins.

At the same time, many popular Bluesky accounts urged their followers to simply “block and move on,” with comedian Paul F Tomkins declaring that it’s “Weirdly fun to block the White House.”

Less than 48 hours after joining, the White House has already become one of the most blocked accounts on Bluesky. According to ClearSky, which tracks Bluesky blocking stats, the White House account is blocked by around 91,000 accounts, while being followed by only 10,000. The only account that’s been blocked by more Bluesky users belongs to Vice President JD Vance, who joined back in June. 

While the various new government accounts hadn’t quite reached those heights by Sunday morning, they accounted for all of the top 5 most blocked accounts in the last 24 hours. And other right-wing accounts seemed to be boasting about following the Trump administration to Bluesky and getting widely blocked.