John Burn-Murdoch

Reply to @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

Despite a massive head start, BlueSky has now overtaken Threads in the US 👇

This is really getting quite remarkable

• BlueSky user numbers have doubled in the past week and now total 3.5 million across US & UK 🚀

• Number of people deleting their X/Twitter account remains way up

And the next chart is particularly notable...

NEW 🧵

The number of people travelling from Europe to the US in recent weeks has plummeted by as much as 35%, as travellers have cancelled plans in response to Trump’s policies and rhetoric, and horror stories from the border.

Story: www.ft.com/content/6dc1...

NEW: updated long-run gap in voting between young men and women in Germany:

Gender divide continues to widen, but contrary to what is often assumed, young men continue to vote roughly in line with the overall population, while young women have swung sharply left.

www.ft.com/content/29fd...

The key chart right now:

Usually US economic pain is cushioned by falling bond yields and a strengthening dollar, which mean lower interest rates and more spending power for consumers.

This time we’re seeing the opposite, meaning the pain will be amplified.

NEW: The actions of Trump and Vance in recent weeks highlight something under-appreciated.

The American right is now ideologically closer to countries like Russia, Turkey and in some senses China, than to the rest of the west (even the conservative west).

My column: www.ft.com/content/3046...

NEW 🧵

A quick thread of charts showing how Trump’s economic agenda is going so far:

1) US consumers are reacting very very negatively.

These are the worst ratings for any US government’s economic policy since records began.

The website vs app split for Bluesky vs Threads captures the difference in user base and usage patterns beautifully.

Bluesky = knowledge sector workers who have it open all day in a tab next to their emails. “Wait what was I doing again?”

Threads = normies watching recipe videos on the commute.

Reply to @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

2) Trump has had the same impact on economic uncertainty as a global pandemic.

We’re going to hear lots of stories about which people, policies and rhetoric are to blame for the Democrats’ defeat.

Some of those stories may even be true!

But an underrated factor is that 2024 was an absolutely horrendous year for incumbents around the world 👇 

NEW 🧵 Is human intelligence starting to decline?

Recent results from major international tests show that the average person’s capacity to process information, use reasoning and solve novel problems has been falling since around the mid 2010s

What should we make of this?

www.ft.com/content/a801...

Reply to @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

Striking stat from @kellycnbc.bsky.social on this:

The rise in treasury yields since Trump’s tariffs were announced leads to an increase in US debt interest payments that is larger than all the DOGE savings.

Going to try to start posting more on here given the increasingly suffocating toxicity of the other place 👋

British NIMBYism is truly a sight to behold.

“We are rejecting this solar farm, because one time I saw an electric vehicle on fire, which reminded me that decades ago a coal mining disaster killed lots of children”.

Oxford Clarion @oxfordclarion.bsky.social

A solar farm that could have powered “all the households in Witney” has been refused permission by West Oxfordshire District Council. Councillors were concerned about the risk of fire, one drawing parallels to the 1966 Aberfan disaster: “Until someone can guarantee it is safe, I can’t support it.”

Reply to @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

3) That was just the US version.

What’s particularly impressive is that he’s managed this on a global scale.

Starting to get the feeling that “Trump” annotation is going to be the chart equivalent of a layer of volcanic ash in the fossil record.

Taking a brief break from making charts to make a human.

Apologies in advance for all the parenting dataviz to come.

Grimly crisp illustration of the mechanism whereby toxic and unrepresentative social media shapes mainstream coverage.

Prominent journalist logs onto X, sees claim, assumes truth, repeats in national broadcast from trusted mainstream news org.

Happens all day every day, just especially stark here.

Here are UK & US BlueSky numbers separately, to show what’s driving the trends:

• Aug 3rd: Musk says ‘civil war is inevitable’ in UK during far right riots

• Oct 17th: Musk changes the block function on X, prompting a massive exodus

• Nov 7th: thousands more migrate in aftermath of Trump victory

🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃

“One of the challenges the NHS has with cyber security is that many NHS computers are still using Windows XP”

(which was released in 2001 and stopped receiving cyber security support from Microsoft a decade ago)

🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃

Reply to @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

8) And this one is important.

For all the talk about the powerful pro-Trump media ecosystem, the share of Americans who have heard negative business news coverage of the government has exploded.

Evidently even the podcast bros can’t distract Americans from the realities of the stock market.

Reply to @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

Corporate quotes are usually pretty dry, but the co-founder of major travel website Kayak wasn’t mincing his words:

Quick thread on the BBC and the political and societal significance of recent developments:

One of the main reasons the UK has historically been so much less polarised than the US, is that Britain has a shared source of information, consumed and trusted by most people regardless of their politics.

Reply to @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

4) Well over half of Americans expect the economy to deteriorate over the next year, again the highest figure ever recorded.

Reply to @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

9/9 And another angle on the same dynamic:

Trump’s approval is holding up very well with Maga, but he’s rapidly losing support among the rest of the coalition who voted for him in November.

Or to put it another way, the view from inside the Maga echo chamber remains rosy. Outside, not so much...