Vice President JD Vance was briefly suspended Wednesday evening by liberal X competitor Bluesky within the first hour of the country’s No. 2 leader joining the platform. The account has since been reinstated.
“We welcome the Vice President to the conversation on Bluesky,” the company told Digital in an email response, noting, “There have been many past attempts to impersonate Vice President JD Vance on Bluesky as he is a public figure, and the jd-vance-1.bsky.social account was flagged as part of that pattern by our automated systems, and temporarily suspended.”
“The account was quickly reinstated within 20 minutes of the suspension, and we’ve also added a verified badge to help users confirm the authenticity of the profile,” the statement added.
Bluesky, a social media platform with a similar layout to X, has become a haven for many liberals fleeing X after Elon Musk bought the platform and began making changes. Despite its reputation as a liberal stronghold, Vance set up a profile on Bluesky Wednesday, making his first post at 4:50 p.m.
In the vice president’s first post he said: “Hello Bluesky, I’ve been told this app has become the place to go for common sense political discussion and analysis. So I’m thrilled to be here to engage with all of you.”
Within the post, he embedded a screenshot of Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion issued today in United States v. Skrmetti, which upheld a Tennessee law banning sex change surgeries on minors.
Thomas’ concurrence listed off several problems he found with those challenging Tennessee’s law, which included “there is no medical consensus on how best to treat gender dysphoria in children” and “leading voices in this area have relied on questionable evidence, and have allowed ideology to influence their medical guidance.”
In his second and third posts, Vance said: “To that end, I found Justice Thomas’s concurrence on medical care for transgender youth quite illuminating. He argues that many of our so-called ‘experts’ have used bad arguments and substandard science to push experimental therapies on our youth,” and “I might add that many of those scientists are receiving substantial resources from big pharma to push these medicines on kids. What do you think?”
