Introduction
Federal Canadian Members of Parliament (MPs) regularly turn to social media platforms like Twitter (X)Footnote 1 to broadcast political messaging and highlight how they are undertaking their representative duties. Twitter has served as an important medium for Canadian MPs and political parties since its public release in 2006 (Small, Reference Small, Marland, Giasson and Tamara2014). However, Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform in Fall 2022 and his political alignment with President of the United States Donald Trump in the recent presidential election, raised questions about the platform’s future use (Chayka, Reference Chayka2025). These concerns, combined with changes to the platform, such as reduced content moderation, allowing the harassment of MPs, and permitting foreign interference (De Angelis, Reference De Angelis2024; Thompson, Reference Thompson2024), prompted many politicians, political practitioners and journalists to search for an alternative platform.
Bluesky, an open, decentralized microblogging social media platform, is considered a new version of Twitter because of the former’s similar affordances and interfaces to the latter but without the toxicity and harassment (Kleppmann et al., Reference Kleppmann, Paul Frazee, Jay Graber, Devin Ivy, Newbold and Volpert2024; Thompson, Reference Thompson2024). Affordances are described as what platforms are “…actually capable of doing and perceptions of what they enable, along with the actual practices that emerge as people interact with them” (Kreiss et al., Reference Kreiss, Lawrence and McGregor2017: 12, emphasis in original). On Bluesky, users can share public posts (sometimes called “skeets” by users) containing up to 300 text characters, four pictures, links and hashtags.
Taking up Gerring (Reference Gerring2012) and Lazer’s (Reference Lazer2024) calls for more mere description of how emerging social media platforms are used in their initial period of operation, this note will address two research questions: How many Canadian MPs are on Bluesky? What types of posts do Canadian MPs share on Bluesky? Our research fills gaps in the literature looking at the political uses of Bluesky by systematically analyzing how many MPs have joined the platform and how they integrate their prior knowledge of social media platform affordances into the initial types of content they share. Our results show that MPs and their staff apply the same logic from Twitter to Bluesky, primarily sharing posts that discuss the Ottawa bubble, policy issues and their constituency. These results advance our understanding of how Canadian MPs navigate communicating with the public in a fragmented hybrid media system.
Bluesky Background
Jack Dorsey, a Twitter cofounder, established the initiative that would become Bluesky in 2019 (Bluesky, 2025). It was incorporated, separately to Twitter, in October 2021 by CEO Jay Graber (Lewis, Reference Lewis2023). Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter in 2022 formally separated the two companies. An invite-only beta version of Bluesky launched in February 2023, before opening to the public in February 2024 (Oremus, Reference Oremus2024; Quelle and Bovet, Reference Quelle and Bovet2025). Bluesky is a Public Benefit Corporation based in the United States and is owned by Graber and others (Bluesky, 2025).
Bluesky is built around an approach called the Authenticated Transfer (AT) Protocol, designed to make it decentralized and independent of Bluesky itself (Bluesky, 2025). The different aspects needed to make a social network operate such as an account, posts and likes are separated and could be provided by different entities (Kleppmann et al., Reference Kleppmann, Paul Frazee, Jay Graber, Devin Ivy, Newbold and Volpert2024). As a simplified example, consider how you can access your email using a variety of different applications including Apple Mail or Mozilla Thunderbird, not just Microsoft Outlook. In contrast, if you want to use Facebook, it is difficult to do that without using Facebook controlled applications. The AT Protocol is also designed to allow portability of identity and data, allowing you to move your network between platforms (Kleppmann et al., Reference Kleppmann, Paul Frazee, Jay Graber, Devin Ivy, Newbold and Volpert2024). This is like how you can keep your phone number even if you change cell phone providers.
Steady growth has since occurred on the platform and as of January 2025, there are more than 30 million users (Bluesky, 2025), although it is still much smaller than Twitter with 500 million users (Chayka, Reference Chayka2025). Trump’s re-election and Twitter’s association with Musk, corresponded with a large increase in the number of Bluesky users. Some Bluesky users are “[d]isaffected Twitter/X users” and so “[d]iscourse is solidly left-leaning” (Chayka, Reference Chayka2025). It is becoming a prevalent platform in the high-choice media environment for the public to receive and exchange political information and news (Kreiss et al., Reference Kreiss, Lawrence and McGregor2017). While it is inexpensive to post the same content to different platforms, there is a small cost from a staffer’s time, which increases if replies are to be engaged with and content tailored to that platform. Consequently, Canadian MPs must weigh the costs and benefits of pivoting to, or adding, another social media platform to their communication strategies.
The political uses of social media by Canadian MPs
In the hybrid media system, MPs and their staff use social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to disseminate political information. Political parties tightly control social media messaging and branding by sending out daily key messages and graphics (Marland, Reference Marland2020), turning MPs into partisan brand ambassadors as part of the permanent campaign. This process of nonstop communication is described as “…harnessing all available resources to win every battle and every news cycle” (Marland, Reference Marland2020: 132). Giasson et al. (Reference Giasson, Le Bars and Dubois2019), Small (Reference Small, Marland, Giasson and Tamara2014) and Small and Giasson (Reference Small, Giasson, Tamara and Jansen2020) found that although MPs and parties claim to have embraced web 2.0 technologies, rigid party messaging makes it challenging to engage in real-time two-way flows of communication with the public, leaving their social media accounts largely a place to broadcast political messaging. Social media’s key feature is interactivity, but many Canadian MPs treat it as a broadcast tool, partially due to party discipline (Marland and Power, Reference Marland, Power, Tamara and Jansen2020). Even then New Democratic party (NDP) MP Charlie Angus, who is most active on Bluesky and has fewer party constraints, mostly posts announcements rather than engaging in conversations with his followers.
While adhering to party discipline, MPs and their staff tailor their content per platform based on their understanding of “imagined audiences” (Marwick and boyd, Reference Marwick and boyd2011) and platform affordances (Bossetta, Reference Bossetta2018; Kreiss et al., Reference Kreiss, Lawrence and McGregor2017). Bossetta (Reference Bossetta2018) found that although politicians and their staff in the United States understand the impact of different platform affordances and that some platforms necessitate specific types of content, there is often direct overlap between content posted on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. In Canada, understanding of platform affordances varies by MP and whether they have the resources to hire multiple staff to manage their online presence (Marland and Power, Reference Marland, Power, Tamara and Jansen2020). Content shared by Canadian MPs on each platform often directly overlaps (Small and Giasson, Reference Giasson, Le Bars and Dubois2019). As a more “political” platform, Twitter’s imagined audience is journalists, partisans and other Ottawa bubble insiders. Twitter is used to engage in partisan debates (Marland and Power, Reference Marland, Power, Tamara and Jansen2020), broadcast information about political issues and current events (Small, Reference Small, Marland, Giasson and Tamara2014), and set the agenda for journalists covering politics in traditional media (Kreiss et al., Reference Kreiss, Lawrence and McGregor2017). Small (Reference Small2010) found that less than 16 per cent of tweets on the accounts of Canadian politicians and political parties were conversations between politicians and their followers.
Content posted by Canadian politicians on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok sometimes overlaps because the platform architecture necessitates that they post pictures and videos. Facebook encourages longer-form and visual content, ranging from professional content like video clips from Question Period to personal family pictures (Marland and Power, Reference Marland, Power, Tamara and Jansen2020). MPs also engage with the public more on Facebook through selectively replying to comments and hosting live streamed town hall meetings (Small and Giasson, Reference Giasson, Le Bars and Dubois2019). Moreover, Small and Giasson (Reference Giasson, Le Bars and Dubois2019) and Mattan et al. (Reference Mattan, Harris and Small2024) show that YouTube is used to broadcast proceedings from the House of Commons and partisan advertising, with MPs most frequently using the platform to speak to their followers through “direct to viewer” style videos. Fewer prior studies evaluate how politicians integrate newer platforms like Instagram and TikTok into their communication repertoires (Lalancette and Raynauld, Reference Lalancette and Raynauld2019; Moir, Reference Moir2023). Analysis of now former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Instagram highlights that he used the platform to convey his political work through personalization and visual storytelling (Lalancette and Raynauld, Reference Lalancette and Raynauld2019), while other MPs share personal content, such as pictures from family holidays (Marland and Power, Reference Marland, Power, Tamara and Jansen2020). Now former NDP leader Jagmeet Singh is best known for leveraging TikTok’s affordances, including using trending audio and hashtags, to create short videos that engage younger voters and address policy issues like healthcare and systemic racism (Moir, Reference Moir2023).
Kreiss et al. (Reference Kreiss, Lawrence and McGregor2017) emphasize that to be successfully elected, and re-elected, politicians need to adopt emerging platforms and mediums, while differentiating affordances, audiences, and types of content. These previous findings suggest that Canadian MPs and their staff can somewhat distinguish the different audiences and types of content each platform necessitates, using Twitter to speak to Ottawa bubble insiders, while employing Facebook and Instagram to broadcast messages to a wider audience. By focusing on Bluesky, our research note contributes to the literature by analyzing how many MPs are on the platform and the types of content they share, while studying how MPs and their staff perceive the logic and affordances behind Bluesky in comparison to other social media platforms they routinely use.
Data and Methodology
How many MPs are on Bluesky?
Before collecting and analyzing MPs’ posts, we first created a dataset with each MP’s Bluesky username, profile URL, account status (active or inactive), gender, political affiliation, constituency and province/territory to answer our first research question. Information about an MP’s gender, political affiliation, constituency and province/territory came from the House of Commons’ (2025) official website.
To populate the dataset with Bluesky account information, we looked up each individual MP, searching by their first and last name, looking through both the “recent posts” and “people” tabs on Bluesky. We also looked at who media outlets like The Hill Times and journalists like Global News’ David Akin follow. Both The Hill Times and Akin are active on the platform and are making a conscious effort to re-build the Canadian politics community from Twitter.Footnote 2
We then labeled whether an MP’s account is “active” or “inactive.” We considered an MP’s account as “active” if they have posted at least one original post since December 1, 2024. We labeled accounts as “inactive” if they had posts only from 2023 or early 2024, or may not have any posts, with the MP simply obtaining their username. One potential criticism of the “active” definition is that it allows accounts that mostly just repost, such as Green party leader Elizabeth May, to be categorized as “active.” We repeated this data collection process multiple times between November 28, 2024, and January 10, 2025. We used this dataset to generate summary statistics and inform the data collection process for the posts we analyzed. See the Appendix for the full list of MPs with Bluesky accounts.
We find 123 MPs, 71 men and 52 women have Bluesky accounts. Looking at the political affiliations of those 123 MPs, there are 73 Liberals, 23 NDP, 9 Conservatives and 18 from other parties or are Independents.
What types of posts are MPs sharing?
We used the statistical programming language R (R Core Team, 2024) and the R package atrrr (Gruber et al., Reference Gruber, Guinaudeau and Votta2024) to collect original posts from active MPs posted between December 7 and December 21, 2024. We selected this two-week period because it represents a tumultuous time in federal Canadian politics with many salient events for MPs to post about, in addition to routine parliamentary business and holiday gatherings. Notable events include the start of the Trudeau government’s GST/HST tax break on December 14, the resignation of then Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland from Cabinet on December 16, the swearing in of new Cabinet members on December 20, then NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh stating that he would introduce a non-confidence motion to topple the government on December 20 and looming threats of economic tariffs and annexation from then incoming US President Trump (Ljunggren, Reference Ljunggren2024).
We collected posts written in both English and French to evaluate the full extent of early Bluesky use by MPs across all provinces and parties. However, almost all the posts in our sample were in English (Table 1). Some MPs posted the same content in English and then in a separate post in French. In that situation, we counted the posts separately for each language. A few posts included both English and French for the same content in the same post, separated by emojis or hyphens. In these cases, we coded the language as the first one that appeared in the post, which was always English. We did not collect quote posts or re-posts, because we wanted to evaluate how MPs and their staff navigated the changing communication environment and perceived the new platform affordances, while adhering to party messaging (Marland and Power, Reference Marland, Power, Tamara and Jansen2020). In total, we collected 557 posts from 66 MPs.
Table 1. The number of posts on Bluesky, by language
To answer our second research question, we did qualitative content analysis of MPs’ Bluesky posts. The two authors collaborated on the initial development of the coding schedule by reviewing relevant literature and a sample of posts. We validated the coding schedule by independently coding a sample of posts and meeting to compare our results, discuss discrepancies and improve the descriptions of the categories in the coding schedule (Elo et al., Reference Elo, Maria Kääriäinen, Pölkki, Utriainen and Kyngäs2014). Following the approach of Elo et al. (Reference Elo, Maria Kääriäinen, Pölkki, Utriainen and Kyngäs2014), which focuses on trustworthiness, one author was primarily responsible for analysis, with the other author validating their work by analyzing 10 per cent of the total number of posts (N = 56) and conducting spot checks on the remaining 90 per cent of coded posts (N = 501). When discrepancies were found, the authors discussed their rationale and came to an agreed upon categorization.
We drew on the categories of Marland and Snagovsky (Reference Marland and Snagovsky2023) in developing our coding schedule. These are policy, constituency and Ottawa bubble. We then added our own: partisan, personal and platform. The coding is collectively exhaustive and mutually exclusive, meaning we assigned each post to exactly one of the six categories.
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1. Policy:
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• Definition: Posts that discuss a specific policy, such as housing, dental care and the Canada Child Benefit. Includes government legislation and Private Members’ Bills from the 44th Parliament.
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• Key words & examples: Agriculture, language rights, fisheries and oceans, energy, international and internal trade, military, public safety and crime, Canada-US relations, climate change, environment, economy, taxes, dental care (as a policy), healthcare, infrastructure, GST/HST tax break. Pieces of legislation include Bill C-63 (Online Harms Act) and Bill C-415 (Flight Attendants’ Remuneration Act).
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2. Constituency:
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• Definition: Discussion of services that an MP’s constituency office offers, including immigration, employment and federal government benefits. Also includes posts about local funding announcements, school, community centre/organization and small business visits, pictures from the riding, and celebration of the accomplishments of local volunteers and community leaders.
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• Key words & examples: Canada Child Benefit, Dental Care (access), pension, immigration, school visits, shopping and supporting small businesses, local infrastructure projects.
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3. Ottawa bubble:
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• Definition: Posts which talk about parliamentary and Cabinet affairs and the day-to-day business of government operations in Ottawa.
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• Key words & examples: Text, pictures and video clips from Question Period, parliamentary committee meetings, bills and motions, parliamentary association and friendship group meetings, Parliamentary Budget Officer, votes, prorogation, deadlock, opposition day, resignation of Chrystia Freeland from Cabinet, and other pictures and videos that feature Ottawa/parliamentary buildings and backdrops.
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4. Partisan:
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• Definition: Posts which discuss the leader or partisan activities, including making phone calls to supporters, knocking on doors, volunteering during a day of action to contact voters, nomination meetings and appeals to citizens to vote for (or not vote for) specific candidates or parties.
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• Key words & examples: Partisan attacks, canvassing and phone banking, days of action, attending party events, by-election and pre-election campaigning, nomination meetings and Liberal party leadership race.
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5. Personal:
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• Definition: Posts about moments and issues other than politics that focus on things like family and friends, health issues, birthdays, pets and major holidays.
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• Key words & examples: Christmas, Hanukkah, happy holidays (broadly), vacation pictures, music and book recommendations.
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6. Platform:
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• Definition: Posts that discuss the act of joining Bluesky and platform affordances, including the platform culture which emphasizes deliberative discourse and less disinformation, toxic discourse and bots.
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• Key words & examples: “Hello Bluesky,” new platform, deliberative space, less disinformation, hate speech, harassment, bots and AI content.
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We opted to use broader categories to best describe and fully account for the nature of posts MPs share on the platform.
Results and Discussion
Number of MPs on Bluesky
Based on our analysis, Table 2 shows the number of MPs by political affiliation on Bluesky and the number in the House of Commons. One hundred and twenty-three MPs have Bluesky accounts, representing approximately 36 per cent of the 338 MPs elected to Parliament. Seventy-one per cent of all MPs with accounts are considered active. This is like early Twitter adoption, when 37 per cent of MPs had joined but only 20 per cent were active (Blevis, Reference Blevis2010; Small, Reference Small2011).
Table 2. Number of MPs on Bluesky, by political affiliation
The parties are present on Bluesky to different extents, and this emphasizes challenges with broadcasting messaging and communicating with the public in a fragmented media environment (Kreiss et al., Reference Kreiss, Lawrence and McGregor2017). The NDP and Liberals are overrepresented on Bluesky, while the Conservatives are underrepresented, in comparison to the number of seats each party holds in the House of Commons. Twenty-three of the 25 NDP MPs have accounts, constituting 18.7 per cent of MPs on Bluesky and 7 per cent of the House. Of the 153 Liberal MPs in the House, 73 are on Bluesky, accounting for 46 per cent of all members in the House but 59.3 per cent of all early MPs on Bluesky. In contrast, Conservative MPs have publicly expressed skepticism about the platform, because of concerns about left-wing bias, with only nine members of their caucus of 120 having created accounts and four actively posting at the time of data collection and analysis (Quelle and Bovet, Reference Quelle and Bovet2025; Thompson, Reference Thompson2024). For instance, Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner posted on Bluesky that she is worried that the platform is a “…different flavour of echo chamber” and will continue prioritizing posting on other platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube (Rempel Garner, Reference Rempel Garner2024). The Conservatives account for 7.3 per cent of MPs on Bluesky, but 36 per cent of all MPs in the House of Commons during our data collection period.
The number of Bloc Québécois, Green and Independent MPs on Bluesky is proportional to the number of MPs they have in the House. The Bloc make up 10 per cent of all members in the House, with its 13 MPs on Bluesky representing 10.6 per cent of MPs on Bluesky. Both Green party MPs have Bluesky accounts, amounting to less than one per cent of MPs in the House and 1.6 per cent of all MPs on Bluesky. Three of the four Independent members are on BlueskyFootnote 3 , totaling 2.4 per cent of the MPs on Bluesky and under 1 per cent of all MPs in the House of Commons.
Bluesky adoption by MPs’ gender suggests that perceived differences in platform toxicity and harassment contribute to whether women MPs join the platform and share posts. Table 3 shows that there is close to gender parity in early adoption of Bluesky, with 58 per cent men and 42 per cent women MPs. This contrasts with the number of elected MPs in the House of Commons during our data collection period, where only 30.9 per cent are women (House of Commons, 2025). The higher uptake by women MPs may be because they are expected to share information about how they are undertaking their representative duties, but are looking to do so on a platform with less harassment and toxic discourse and stronger content moderation policies (De Angelis, Reference De Angelis2024; Thompson, Reference Thompson2024).
Table 3. Number of MPs on Bluesky, by gender
Men MPs were substantially more prolific posters on Bluesky than women, despite near gender parity in the number of MPs with accounts (Table 4). This suggests that women MPs may be taking a more calculated approach to initially posting on Bluesky, after their experiences with toxicity and harassment on other social media platforms. However, in both cases, their posts were mostly about policy and the Ottawa bubble.
Table 4. The number of posts on Bluesky, by gender and classification
A small number of prolific MPs are responsible for a large number of posts (Figure 1). In particular, then MP Charlie Angus (NDP, Ontario) was the most prolific with 93 posts, followed by MP Rob Oliphant (Liberal, Ontario) with 32, and then MP Bonita Zarrillo (NDP, BC) with 27. Most MPs in our sample posted fewer than five times.
Figure 1. The number of posts on Bluesky, by MP.
Representativeness of Bluesky posts
The number of posts shared on Bluesky varies by MPs’ political affiliation. In our sample, the number of posts is dominated by Liberal and NDP MPs (Table 5). Combined, the Bloc, Conservatives and Independents made up less than 7 per cent of the posts.
Table 5. The number of posts on Bluesky, by political affiliation
Posts from MPs representing ridings in Ontario and BC dominated our sample (Table 6). This is related to the parties of the MPs on Bluesky. Quebec placed third for the province with the highest number of posts, even though 39 per cent of Bloc MPs are on Bluesky, along with MPs from other parties elected to represent Quebec ridings. This finding contrasts with research by Giasson et al. (Reference Giasson, Le Bars and Dubois2019), which found that provincial political parties in Quebec quickly and aptly integrated new media approaches and platforms into their previous communication and campaign strategies. Small and Giasson (Reference Giasson, Le Bars and Dubois2019) attribute increased Twitter use by Quebec provincial political parties, compared to Ontario parties to differences in ideology and resources. Posts from MPs representing Atlantic, Prairie and Northern ridings are also underrepresented in our sample. Until there is broader usage of Bluesky among MPs, which could lead to a wider variety of provincial representation, it is difficult to see how content could be considered representative of broader Canadian concerns. Indeed, current use of Bluesky and the lack of provincial representation suggests that MPs and their staff may view the platform as a place to engage with other politicians, journalists and Ottawa bubble insiders, instead of constituents and stakeholders in their riding.
Table 6. The number of posts on Bluesky, by the province of the riding the MPs represents
Types of posts
Turning to the types of content MPs posted, we found common themes across posts shared by MPs from all political parties. Most posts in our sample were about policy, followed by the Ottawa bubble and constituency (Table 7). For instance, in Figure 2, which is coded as policy, Liberal MP and then Minister of Transport and President of the Treasury Board Anita Anand discusses policy measures promised in the government’s 2024 Fall economic statement, aimed at streamlining the pension process for government of Canada employees. The period that we collected our sample in was unusual in that many politicians responded to comments by, the then incoming, US President Trump. These were classified as policy, because of their connection to Canada-US relations and foreign policy, even though the content of these posts was not always particularly civil or detailed. The GST/HST tax break was also one of the most discussed policies by MPs from across different parties.
Table 7. The number of posts on Bluesky, by classification
Figure 2. Example of a policy post from Liberal MP and Minister Anita Anand.
Ottawa bubble posts focused on Chrystia Freeland’s resignation from Cabinet, partisanship obstructing parliamentary business and other routine parliamentary proceedings. For instance, Bloc MP Andréanne Larouche’s post (Figure 3), which we categorized as Ottawa bubble, highlights an interview she did regarding Chrystia Freeland’s resignation as deputy prime minister and minister of finance.
Figure 3. Example Ottawa bubble post from Bloc MP Andréanne Larouche.
The high number of Ottawa bubble posts suggests that MPs already use Bluesky like Twitter: to launch partisan attacks and discuss parliamentary business that would only be of interest to other politicians, political practitioners and journalists (Small, Reference Small, Marland, Giasson and Tamara2014). The Bluesky posts were nearly identical to the types of posts MPs traditionally shared on Twitter (Small, Reference Small2010), suggesting that MPs and their staff apply the same logic and understanding of affordances from Twitter to Bluesky.
Constituency posts often highlighted MPs visiting small businesses and attending holiday celebrations in their ridings or honouring volunteers for their contributions to the community. For instance, Figure 4 shows Conservative MP Greg McLean attending a local fundraising dinner. We coded this post as constituency because the event takes place in his riding, as indicated through the hashtag #calgarycentre.
Figure 4. Example constituency post from Conservative MP Greg McLean.
Partisan posts often called out then Prime Minister Trudeau and the Liberals for failing to take action on important policies or drawing attention to proposed policy ideas from Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre. For instance, Figure 5 shows a post we categorized as partisan because then NDP MP Peter Julian focuses on calling out Conservative MPs for opposing signature NDP policies like dental care and pharmacare.
Figure 5. Example of a post categorized as partisan from then NDP MP Peter Julian.
Personal posts often discussed music, books and holiday traditions. For instance, we categorized Figure 6 as personal because Liberal MP Mark Gerretsen shares a video of his children making holiday treats and wishes everyone a happy holiday.
Figure 6. Example personal post from Liberal MP Mark Gerretsen.
Lastly, the few posts categorized as platform discussed joining the Bluesky community. Although only 1.3 per cent of posts were coded as platform, many MPs shared similar posts when they joined the platform outside of our sampling period, in either November or early December 2024. For instance, then Liberal MP and Minister of Diversity, Inclusion and Persons with Disabilities Kamal Khera’s post (Figure 7) provides an example of the types of posts we often saw MPs share when they first joined the platform and were excited to be there.
Figure 7. Example of a post categorized as platform from then Liberal MP and Minister Kamal Khera.
Table 8 shows the number of posts broken down by political affiliation and classification. Liberal MPs tended to post about policy or their constituency, while NDP MPs posted about a variety of topics including the Ottawa bubble, policy and personal. Bloc, Conservative and Independent MPs most frequently shared posts categorized as Ottawa bubble. The Green party did not share any original posts within our sampling period. These differences may reflect different approaches to social media by the parties (Small and Giasson, Reference Small, Giasson, Tamara and Jansen2020). In particular, the frequency of Ottawa bubble posts from opposition MPs suggests that they use Bluesky, much like Twitter, to levy “…harder edged criticism of the government” (Marland and Power, Reference Marland, Power, Tamara and Jansen2020: 37).
Table 8. The number of posts on Bluesky, by political affiliation and classification
Conclusion
Are MPs on Bluesky? Yes, 123 already are and more will likely join in the coming weeks and months. This represents about 36 per cent of all MPs in the House, and about 71 per cent of those are actively posting on Bluesky. Women MPs are overrepresented relative to their share of seats in Parliament, but post less frequently, possibly reflecting caution following negative experiences on other platforms. Conservative MPs are notably absent, often citing ideological concerns.
We found limited scholarly work examining the political uses of Bluesky. This research note provides a description of how many Canadian MPs joined the platform and the types of content they share during Bluesky’s initial period of public operation. Our content analysis of 557 posts from 66 MPs reveals that most posts follow the same logic, discipline and communication strategies from other social media platforms. We found that MPs and their staff largely applied their knowledge of Twitter’s affordances to Bluesky, posting most frequently about policy (especially in response to US politics and domestic legislation), the Ottawa bubble (for example, Freeland’s resignation) and constituency (for example, community events). Posts categorized as partisan, personal or about the platform itself were less common. It will be interesting to see if MPs begin sharing more unique types of content tailored to Bluesky’s affordances as they become more familiar with the platform and how the platform develops and changes over time.
This research note focused on the “supply side” of Bluesky, illustrating how many MPs have accounts and the types of posts they share on the platform. Our findings are a starting point for future qualitative and quantitative studies evaluating messaging, hashtag use, campaign strategies and the increased fragmentation of the platforms MPs use to communicate with the public. Focusing on the “demand side” of Bluesky, future research could also investigate how MPs and the public interact and whether their discourse can be understood as deliberative.
We have offered an initial, systematic, look at how Canadian MPs are using Bluesky. With open, accessible data and a growing user base, Bluesky is an exciting additional data source that will help us better understand Canadian politics. We look forward to much future work in this area.
Our code and data are available here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15580691
Acknowledgements
We thank Associate Editor Erin Tolley and the three anonymous reviewers for their time and thoughtful suggestions which greatly improved this research note.
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Appendix Additional data details
Table 1. List of all Canadian Federal MP Bluesky usernames, as of January 10, 2025
Open access
