Justice Should Be Seen By All

Why New Zealand's Courts Were Wrong to Abandon X

The courts and Parliament’s support services have quietly moved their social media presence to Bluesky — and in doing so, have made a political statement they had no business making.

The Rule of Law is not a bureaucratic abstraction. It is the foundational promise that the law applies equally to all, that decisions made in the name of the public are accessible to the public, and that no one — not even the state — is above accountability. Central to that promise is something deceptively simple: people must be able to find the law.

That is why the recent decision by New Zealand’s court system to abandon X in favour of Bluesky deserves far more scrutiny than it has received. The shift was announced quietly, without explanation, and without apparent concern for its implications. That silence is itself revealing.

Reach Is Not a Minor Consideration

Let us begin with the most basic objection. X — whatever one thinks of its ownership or culture — has approximately 600 million monthly active users worldwide. Bluesky has around 41.5 million. That is not a marginal difference. It is a difference of an order of magnitude.

New Zealand’s courts exist to serve New Zealanders — all of them, not a self-selected subset who have migrated to a niche platform that most people in this country have never heard of.

When a court issues a judgment of public significance, the goal of notifying the public is defeated if the notification reaches only those who already inhabit a particular digital corner of the internet.

In a country where ignorance of the law is no excuse, the institutions responsible for making the law accessible have a special obligation to broadcast as widely as possible. Choosing a platform with a fraction of the reach of its predecessor is, at minimum, a failure of that obligation. At worst, it is indifference to it.

No Reasons Were Given — And That Is a Problem in Itself

Perhaps more troubling than the decision itself is the manner in which it was made. No public explanation was offered by the courts. No explanation was offered by the Office of the Clerk, which made a parallel move for parliamentary communications the previous month. The public, whose institutions these are, was simply informed of the change and invited to follow along — on Bluesky.

This is not how public institutions in a democracy ought to behave when making decisions that affect public access to information. The courts, of all institutions, understand the importance of giving reasons. Reasoned decisions are what distinguish the rule of law from the rule of whim. When a judge delivers a decision without reasons, it is not justice — it is mere pronouncement. The same principle applies, in a different register, to the administrative decisions of public institutions.

If there were legitimate reasons for leaving X — concerns about content moderation, reputational risk, the conduct of other users on the platform — those reasons should have been stated openly, so the public could evaluate them. The failure to do so is a transparency deficit that sits uneasily with the values both institutions are supposed to embody.

The Platform Choice Is Not Politically Neutral

The silence around the decision invites scrutiny of the decision itself — and that scrutiny raises uncomfortable questions.

Bluesky is not simply a smaller X. It has a distinct identity and a distinct user base. It emerged, in large part, as a refuge for users who found X’s increasingly permissive approach to speech uncomfortable. It is widely perceived — and this perception is not unfair — as a platform that skews a “progressive” perspective, one that has attracted users who prefer a more curated, ideologically filtered environment. Its moderation practices and the composition of its early adopter base have reinforced that perception.

X, by contrast, has positioned itself explicitly as a free-speech platform — imperfect, messy, and contentious (but free speech is like that), but committed in principle to the idea that the public square should be open to all voices.

Whatever one thinks of Elon Musk or the direction X has taken, the platform remains where enormous numbers of ordinary New Zealanders — across the political spectrum — engage with public affairs.

By choosing Bluesky over X, New Zealand’s court system and the Office of the Clerk have, whether they intended to or not, signalled a preference. They have chosen the platform of one political sensibility over another.

They have, in effect, communicated that official court announcements will be found more readily by those with progressive sympathies than by those without.

For a commercial company, this would be an unremarkable business decision. For institutions that exist to serve all New Zealanders equally, it is a serious problem.

Public Service Neutrality Is Not Optional

New Zealand’s public service operates under a clear obligation of political neutrality. Public servants serve the government of the day, and through it, the public — all of the public, regardless of political affiliation. That, at least is the ideal.

That ideal of neutrality is not merely a convention; it is the foundation of public trust in institutions that must function regardless of who holds power.

The choice of social media platform may seem trivial by comparison to weightier questions of policy. But symbolism and perception matter enormously in public life.

When public institutions — particularly the courts, whose legitimacy depends on the perception of impartiality, having neither power of the purse nor the sword — are seen to align themselves, even in small ways, with one side of a cultural or political divide, the damage to that perception is real and cumulative.

There is every reason to suspect that this decision reflects, at some level, an ideological preference within the public service — a view that X is a platform associated with the wrong kind of politics, and that Bluesky represents something more congenial.

If that is the case, it is a use of institutional power that those public servants had no mandate to exercise. Their job is to serve the public, not to curate which segment of it receives official communications most conveniently.

The Remedy Is Simple

None of this requires New Zealand’s courts or the Office of the Clerk to endorse X, or Elon Musk, or any view about the culture wars that have come to surround social media. The remedy is simple and costs nothing: maintain a presence on both platforms.

The goal is reach. The goal is access. The goal is ensuring that when a significant judgment is published, as many New Zealanders as possible are in a position to know about it.

That goal is best served by using every major platform available, not by making a quiet political statement through the abandonment of the one with by far the largest audience.

The Rule of Law demands that justice not only be done, but be seen to be done — and in the digital age, that means it must also be found. New Zealand’s court system has made that harder.

It should reconsider.