It was supposed to be a gentler, left-wing alternative to X. My grim experience proves that just isn’t the case.
www.thefp.com
Bluesky Has a Death Threat Problem
It was supposed to be a gentler, left-wing alternative to X. My grim experience proves that just isn’t the case.
Recently, like a lot or journalists, I joined Bluesky, a social media platform that is enjoying a burst of postelection growth and positive press attention. It’s been lauded as a “kinder, gentler”—and, perhaps most importantly, more left-wing—alternative to X, which is increasingly seen as infested with what a Bluesky user might call “MAGA chuds.”
While I thought some of the critiques of X were overstated, over the last six months or so I’ve increasingly soured on it. It felt like an ever more hostile, hateful place, the technology seemed more broken every day, and I am not a fan of owner Elon Musk’s recent conspiracy theorizing and all-in support for Donald Trump. It seemed like time to scope out a potential alternative.
This was a mistake.
On December 6, I made my first post on Bluesky—which was actually launched by Twitter in 2019, before becoming an independent company two years later. As I soon found out, it is an exceptionally angry place. And in part because of a widespread culture of impunity when it comes to violent threats among some of its users, it comes across as a potentially dangerous one—in a way X, or Twitter, never did for me in my decade-plus of actively using that platform. Bluesky has either made a conscious decision to take a laissez-faire attitude toward serious threats of violence, or its moderators are incapable of guarding against them, or both.
There’s at least some evidence for the latter theory. While many left-wing people announced they were leaving X after the election, one million users joined Bluesky that week. The results weren’t pretty. As The Verge reported on November 17, “the Bluesky Safety team posted Friday that it received 42,000 moderation reports in the preceding 24 hours.” That’s more than 10 percent of the number received in the entirety of 2023, which was 360,000.
Bluesky appears to have attracted a particularly high number of these trolls, and even before I arrived on the platform, some of them were making sure I wouldn’t feel welcome there. Nora Reed, an online influencer and cultural critic, wrote in November that “I think we need a plan for if Jesse Singal shows up here in advance.”
“Honestly?” responded one user. “[G]un.” Another user then replied, lamenting the absence of technology that would allow them to shoot me via the internet:
Anyway, I joined nonetheless. I figured these messages were coming from a small group of disturbed people. There’s no lack of disturbed people on X—albeit ones who usually have very different politics—and I really did want an alternative to X.
When I arrived, I was was bombarded with messages from people telling me to kill myself, or expressing their opinion that I should be killed. When a Change.org petition signed by 25,000 people failed to get me booted off the platform—likely due to my having never come close to violating any rule—the anger only spread further.
Here is talking about the death threats he received at Bluesky. Leftism is a cult that won't accept any difference of opinion.
