Yves here. Rajiv Sethi discusses how Bluesky subscribers are allowed not only allowed to mass ban followers of a member, but also a feature that amounts to more “guilty by association” ad hominem attacks if you are the sort that sees following “bad” people as an indicator the follower is suspect. Admittedly, as Sethi carefully explains, the ad hom feature is limited in reach; only people who follow the person making the charge can see the designation, and then only if one also activates the warning.
The fact that merely following people who some Bluesky users think engage in wrongthink can be used to generate a content warning is the social media version of precrime.
Bluesky has less than 1/10th the number of followers that Twitter has. One would like to think the enthusiasm, or at least tolerance, for censorship will put a ceiling on its reach. But the reality is we’ll have to see how this struggle over social media content plays out.
By Rajiv Sethi, Professor of Economics, Barnard College, Columbia University &; External Professor, Santa Fe Institute. Originally published at his site
A recent article by Renée DiResta is interesting for a number of different reasons.
To begin with, the audio accompanying the piece uses an AI voice generator from ElevenLabs that sounds quite human to me (though not much like DiResta herself). I imagine that it won’t be long before books and articles are widely available in voices that are close to indistinguishable from those of their authors.1 Jointly written pieces could be available with a menu of voices corresponding to the various contributors, and the ability to switch between them midstream.2 The impact on employment and pricing in the audiobook industry would be significant.
Second, DiResta observes that sorting across social media platforms is now being driven by ideology rather than preferences over features. The exodus from X to Bluesky following the November election was dramatic, and there may be a second wave coming in the wake of recent changes in content moderation policies at Threads.3 However, this “great decentralization” is operating at two different levels. In addition to ideological sorting across platforms, there is also greater sorting withinthem as content moderation becomes increasingly delegated.
To illustrate, DiResta describes the reaction on Bluesky to a recent arrival:
In mid-December, tensions erupted on the platform over the sudden presence of a prominent journalist and podcaster who writes about trans healthcare in ways that some of the vocal trans users on the platform considered harmful. In response, tens of thousands of users proactively blocked the perceived problematic account (blocks are public on Bluesky). Community labelers enabled users to hide his posts. The proliferation of shared blocklists included some that enabled users to mass-block followers of the controversial commentator… Shareable blocklists, however expansive they may be, are tools designed to empower users. However, a portion of the community did not feel satisfied with the tools. Instead, it began to ref-work the head of trust and safety on Bluesky, who was deluged with angry demands for a top-down response, including via a petition to ban the objectionable journalist. The journalist, in turn, also contacted the mods—about being on the receiving end of threatening language and doxing himself. The drama highlights the tension between the increased potential for users to act to protect their own individual spaces, and the persistent desire to have centralized referees act on a community’s behalf. And, unfortunately, it illustrates the challenges of moderating a large community with comparatively limited resources.
The “journalist and podcaster” referenced here is of course Jesse Singal, who quickly overtook Brianna Wu to become the most blocked person on Bluesky. As DiResta notes, those who decided to follow him ended up on lists that made it easy for others to block them en masse.4 In addition, their profiles began to carry a label placed in an entirely decentralized manner by a user on the platform. This badge is invisible to most people, but can be seen by anyone who subscribes to the community labeler and chooses to activate the content warning.
Among those I follow, there are currently dozens of people whose accounts are labeled in this way. These include some of the most valuable and informative accounts on the platform, such as that of Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan:
The Bluesky Elder badge (placed by a different community labeler) “is meant in jest and dates to early experiments in labeling. It is applied to the first 800,000 Bluesky accounts.” The Jesse Singal Follower badge is automated and appears “on the profile of accounts that follow Jesse Singal, for informational purposes.” Both badges also appear on DiResta’s account and on my own, as well as on scores of others spanning the conventional ideological spectrum, from Ryan Grim on the left to Robert George on the right.5
It’s worth dwelling a bit on what a label of this kind is meant to convey. There is a literal meaning, which is simply the statement of an indisputable and perhaps unremarkable fact. But there are also imputed meanings that arise from a shared understanding between the sender of the message and its recipient, much like the waving of a red handkerchief in court. In this particular case the badge will be interpreted by some as a warning that the flagged person might be tolerant of bigotry or harassment.
In order to avoid having this ad hominem inference being made about their character, some users will unfollow the objectionable account, or refrain from following it in the first place. And these decisions will sharpen the meaning of the label, since those who continue to carry it will be presumed to find the inference tolerable. But if large numbers of people do not respond in this way—because they reject the inference or are simply unaware of its existence—the meaning of the label will be diluted and the message conveyed will remain ambiguous.6
A third interesting aspect of DiResta’s article is her use of Albert Hirschman’s concepts of exit, voice, and loyalty to understand what is going on here.7 Block lists, badges, and even petitions calling for expulsion are examples of what Hirschman called voice, which he contrasted with exit in his analysis of organizations. One of his key insights was that entities such as firms, educational institutions, or political parties could recover from repairable lapses in performance provided that they had an adequate “time and dollar cushion” to allow for adjustments. If competing alternatives were readily available, those who relied on such organizations could easily jump ship in the face of a deterioration in quality, leading to their rapid collapse. But if exit were difficult or costly, then people would be more inclined to exercise voice instead. While this may be unpleasant for leaders of organizations to experience, it would not immediately threaten viability and could thus provide some breathing room for recuperation.
Whether people express their dissatisfaction using exit or voice is mediated by loyalty—greater attachment to an organization slows exit and strengthens voice. But loyalty can be a consequence of simply having no other viable alternatives available. Hirschman used this idea to argue against the Hotelling-Downs model of political competition, which suggests that party platforms will converge towards the preferences of the median voter. He argued, instead, that someone without an exit option will be “maximally motivated to bring all sorts of potential influence into play” in order to prevent “the party from doing things that are highly obnoxious to him.” Those who have “nowhere else to go” are accordingly “not powerless but influential.” This doesn’t always lead to greater organizational success, and Hirshman points to the nomination of Barry Goldwater by the Republican party in 1964 as an example.
What applies to political parties also applies to social media platforms, though the analogy is obviously imperfect. For platforms, it is network effects rather than psychological attachments that make exit costly, but the implications are similar. Those who have “nowhere else to go” will be maximally motivated to exercise voice, and this is what we are seeing at present on Bluesky.
DiResta argues that ideological sorting across and within platforms, facilitated in part by decentralized content moderation, will lead to increased polarization:
The idealistic goal of federalism in the American experiment was to maintain the nation’s unity while enabling local control of local issues. The digital version of this, however, seems to be a devolution, a retreat into separate spaces that may perhaps increase satisfaction within each outpost but does little to bridge ties, restore mutual norms or diminish animosity across groups. What happens when divergent norms grow so distinct that we can no longer even see or engage with each other’s conversations? The challenge of consensus is no longer simply difficult, it is structurally reinforced.
I’m not as pessimistic. As discussed in an earlier post, shareable lists and labels are instruments that can just as easily be used to dissolve boundaries as to put up walls. They are part of the rough and tumble of free expression online. Such expression—as argued recently by Amna Khalid, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Killer Mike—often serves as a weapon of the weak. But calls for expulsion are a different matter altogether, and I hope that the platform doesn’t bend to these wishes. If one denies to all what is offensive to some, it is the least powerful among us who will ultimately pay the price.
For example, a deepfake produced by researchers at MIT several years ago featured Richard Nixon making a dramatic speech that was written for him but never delivered.
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2 I was trying to imagine the experience of listening to my book with Dan O’Flaherty in this way, switching between our sharply different accents from one chapter to the next. Possibly interesting, and certainly jarring.
3 Mark Zuckerberg has brushed off the prospect of such departures as virtue signaling, which seems strategically unwise—such condescension is unlikely to persuade borderline users to stay.
4 There is also a public list of recommended exceptions—people “who might have a professional reason to follow” Singal, including “self-identified authors, academics, and journalists.”
5 To see the labels at the posted links, you’ll need to subscribe to the labelers and choose show badge in your moderation settings.
6 It’s easy enough to see the lists on which one has been placed or the labels that have been attached to one’s account, but I suspect that most users aren’t fully aware of the manner and pace with which their online reputations are evolving.
7 Hirschman was among the most original and creative economists of the past century. I have written several posts on his life and work, and was honored to speak at a gathering in his memory.
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“some of the most valuable and informative accounts on the platform, such as that of Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan”
Nyhan suffers from chronic TDS and Putin fear syndrome and is currently struggling to deal with severe Hasbara withdrawal, having posted today that polling data show that it’s not clear that speaking out against the genocide in Gaza would have helped the Harris campaign.
I may want to follow people I am in complete disagreement with on a social network to try to understand how their worldview is constructed, but then again, having a list of who follows them might also be useful if I want to turn that spigot off.
The two platforms kinda mirror the two strands of contemporary American discourse, no?
Twitter: a purportedly free speech platform dominated by new-right and their dark money backers. In reality it still censors eg Palestinian voices and anyone who disagrees with the leader. Mysterious algorithms and (speculating here) bots of friends (Pentagon/CIA, Mossad, some non-state networks) guide the flow of information. Open but hostile.
Blue Sky: a purportedly safe space where non-acceptable thoughts, words and association means exclusion and condemnation. No interest in hearing any dissenting voices that reject IDpol. Less hostile but a closed garden.
Neither actually improves the quality of life of the citizenry.
No Twitter is not dominated by the right. I pretty much only follow rightist and was flabbergasted by how much pro-Kamala tweets were in my feed. Twitter is very balanced to a fault in my view.
I think there is an important difference between on one hand bans, shadowbanning and content moderation and algoritmic promotion which the platform performs on its own, or ordered by a government agency. On the other hand we have blocklists and tags that are done by the users to filter the content they see.
Moderation does not scale. One way to handle that on a large platform is to delegate to the users what they see. Blocklists are to my mind rather benign. It allows users that can’t stand each other to exist in the same forum with derailing every conversation with their antagonism. I think the kind of tag-list described in the article, which you only see if you opt in is a continuation, in that it allows groups to self-segregate. I guess that if a group would want to subscribe to a blocklist or tag of persons who follow a particular a blocklist, they could do so? I think that it allows more users to use the platform as they would like by avoiding other users.
I think users should be able to tailor what content they see, and I think algoritmic created content should be seen as editorialised content that the platform should have a publishers responsibility for. That would probably spell an end to algoritmic presented content, but then again in my opinion algoritmic presented content is often algoritmical troll feed. And one shouldn’t feed trolls.
I don’t agree with your view of the particular censorship method described above, of putting a scarlet letter on an account of someone perceived to engage in Wrongthink. This is rank bigotry. Why should the follower be treated as a propagator of the Wrongthink when they have not done so? They can easily be blocked if they go there.
This an effort to discourage all consideration of the Wrongthink, even by those who like hearing all sides of an argument or want to read opposing opinion so they can consider how to address it.
When the USA illegally invaded Iraq, I remember that there was an general ontological common framework to all engaged parties: USA had illegally invaded Iraq, they committed war crimes, bombed civilians etc. However, different factions understood this differently on an deontological level. Some thought that it was horrible others necessary and the disagreement was mainly on the deontological not the ontological level. Today, with the Ukraine-war the ontological disconnect is almost total. People start with their deontological position and then look for facts supporting this position. Can this be reverted? The twitter/bluesky is just cementing this divide. It is mostly harmful for class warriors. Most people on twitter and bluesky suffer from the same shitty lifeconditions and would be better off joining forces to luigi more oligarchs and CEOs than walling themselves off in some sort of virtual space free from epistemological and ontological friction.
Comparing twitter and bluesky is like comparing two buckets of shit. Yes, there may be differences in colour, consistency and smell, but both are shit and should be treated like it.
Lots of Tweets in Links today on Americans going over to Rednote and are shocked to discover that average Chinese have a much better lifestyle than Americans do. Because of the way Rednote is set up, it is easy for them to interact with regular Chinese on there. My point is that rather than trying to compare Bluesky and Twitter, perhaps it would be more rewarding to compare Bluesky with Rednote. After all, Bluesky and Twitter are creatures of Silicon valley and all that that implies while Tik Tok and Rednote came out of a quite different ecosystem.
It is important to understand that we live in a largely alienated and dysfunctional culture not because the culture is “bad” or “wrong” but because we are living together in a far too-rapidly changing world that cannot be comprehended by almost everyone. We are blown around, psychologically and intellectually, by currents and winds composed of alienation, lack of community, families disintegrating in every way possible while people’s normal needs are being torn to pieces. Our culture has devolved into a culture of narcissism where it is every man/woman for themselves at the same time there is a increasing need to connect with something–other people, movements, lovers, friends, nature, religions, and so on. People cling to one thing after another as the whirlwind picks up speed and drugs, distractions and entertainment end up filling our unmet needs–our sense of connecting is getting ever more desperate so we go on social media and pour out our hearts and try to find some sense of communality. This is the heart of those who think of themselves as being on the left (a peculiar left that is moving towards a sort of Stalinism without the personality cult) and many on Bluesky seem to want–i.e., they want to connect to something to fill the hole that culture currently does not supply and that they seem to not understand is a result of the whole-hearted attachment to predatory capitalism both left and right seem to adore. The political/economic/cultural affect of not caring about people but, rather, money and materialism which is at the heart of the capitalist ethic has become a nightmare for human beings and an opportunity for AI and those who control it.
We have to let it work itself out–we need separate sub-cultures to emerge and evolve–we need to allow those who feel connected to connect and exclude others. New communities must evolve just as on the international stage we need many centers of power politically and culturally if for no other reason to calm down alienation. This could be the glory of modern civilization–we need to fragment, get healthy, and then come together where we can without the use of force and physical or emotional violence.
People naturally congregate with others that have the same purpose. It’s not clear to me what the purpose of social media actually is because they don’t seem to be accomplishing anything purposeful.
I belong to a church, like most people who attend, I am there primarily to worship my Creator.
The downside is the people who are (like me) messed up. It’s like a family and the best I can offer is ‘work out the problem because it may not be the other guy, it may be you’. A culture filled with individuals that think themselves ‘exceptional’ and ‘without sin’ only delude themselves in the end.
Learn to get along, get to know the living human beings around you and maybe help each other from time to time.
The post-modern society is an utter failure and humans are no more ‘enlightened’ than they were in the days of Noah. The technology has made them worse rather than better human beings as each person attempts to control the other. It’s pathetic.
I don’t agree that we are “worse”–that depends on your moral framework and metaphysics. I think we are moving on–the very fragmentation and disordered nature of society will force people to open to the deeper levels or our consciousness, i.e., spirituality which is far more natural to us than money worshiping–which is the official religion of the US and the rest of the West to a slightly lesser degree.
Features for increasing fragmentation and flattening of ideas may be attractive to some, but will make them less relevant in elections.
Worth noting just as an aside that Jesse Singal is much stronger pro-trans-rights than the median American, but, as he has written repeatedly, a few individuals decided he was their enemy, started a long block/harassment campaign, and then it kind of took on a life on its own. Now he’s probably better known for being the target of this whole thing than for his actual reporting.
In fact, I am guessing this Bluesky weirdness is going to redound to his benefit…why don’t his alleged enemies care about this? Are they not in on it, too?
Now that I think of it, it feels like the circa-2010 celebrity Twitter feuds that got so much earned media for those involved.
They could have just named the app “Bubble”.
Back in 2019, when the Stanford Internet Observatory was started, Alex Stamos, the director, as well as Renee DiResta, who, a little later became its research manager, heavily promoted and participated in actual internet censorship policies in real time. (See the detailed work and receipt documentation of Mike Benz at the Foundation for Freedom Online).
Both Stamos and DiResta, at that time also strongly endorsed a more centralized, controlled, news network model because of its efficiency in promoting censorship. It is therefore not surprising to see DiResta whine in 2025 that “by returning governance to users and communities, they have the potential to rebuild trust and legitimacy in ways that centralized platforms no longer can. However, they also run the risk of further splintering our society, as users abandon those shared spaces where broader social cohesion may be forged.”
Stamos, DiResta, Kate Starbird, and many, many others were at the tip of the now well-documented sphere promoting internet censorship.
It is important to continue to listen to such people to get a better sense of what the most sophisticated thinking in support of centralized censorship is presently pushing–the idea that without centralized governance, there is no single authority to mediate systemic issues or consistently enforce rules, leading inevitably to increased polarization and loss of social cohesion.
This confirms what I’ve long said: earthworms should rule the world. They do nothing but good while humans remain entitled, spoiled children while wrecking the planet. I’m not on Twitter or Bluesky, but it’s good to know that Bluesky attracts people who think that women should not be able to say no to men in our spaces & sports, and that lesbians are not allowed to exclude men from their dating pool (if “gender”—sexist stereotypes—trumps biological sex, then men can be lesbians. Beyond absurd.).
All hail the earthworm, who’s too busy building soil to care about Bluesky users’ hurt feelings.
It looks like a vacuum exists and will persist . . . waiting to be filled by something like good old twitter. It could be twitter in eXile, and its “tweets” could be called “tweex”. It could be called cricket and its tweets could be called chirps.
But whatever it might be called, someone might build it, ” and they might come.”
I have some friends who ostentatiously announced that they had fled Twitter for BlueSky as part of the recent “Team Blue” exodus after the election, to which my response was that I wasn’t terribly interested in an echo chamber. But then, I don’t “use” Twitter in the conventional manner — I never look at the “timeline/feed.” I only go directly to links posted here or that someone else has directly sent me; otherwise there are a handful of people whose posts I manually check regularly. I think this is minimizing exposure to the algorithm? At any rate I think it prevents me from experiencing whatever it is that people find objectionable about their experience on Twitter, though my suspicion is that my friends in this case are more about signalling something about themselves than anything else.
BlueSky did turn into a seething cesspool of fahklenpt yuppie RAGE & adorable frolicking kittie videos? They HATE: masks, commies, genocide protests & uppity proletariat nudnik ingrate untermenschen. They’re supporting our troops in Altadena, defending celebrity mansions from arsonist looters. Portfolios did WELL under DNC™ LLC & Trump’s Tech Bro Oligarchy threatens their sneeringly insouciant craven obsequiousness to WBD, Comcast, Disney & whomever Sumner Redstone’s survivors tells them, they believe this week? If you mention Teslas fatality rate on X (incineration, locked inside) you’re trolled with half naked bots. But ANY mension of Gaza, Azov Battalion or Biden on BlueSky & you’re summarily red-lined among well-pads, ethane crackers, fentanyl & crankhead deplorables where nobody can hear you scream?
In many ways, Blue Sky has become a reflection of the insecurities of liberal ideology. They don’t have good counterarguments against the traditional economic left nor right wing populists.
Liberals are clearly losing in the political space, with anti-Establishment politicians gaining ground throughout the Western world, and increasingly are losing ground in online social media, with competing ideologies gaining ground on social media and which drove the mass Liberal exodus from X / Twitter (along with Elon Musk purchasing the platform). So they have developed a platform that enables censorship of the people with the ideologies that they disagree with, which is BlueSky.
This is a failure on their part, as Liberal debate skills have clearly fallen. I have noticed how often liberals resort to an “attack the person” type of argument, as opposed to the “why I think your argument is wrong”. Another even bigger problem is that liberals are increasingly struggling to come up with arguments as to how their policies (neoliberal economics and a neocon foreign policy) benefit ordinary people who are not in the upper middle class or rich. That may be why they are resorting to “attack the person” arguments.
Blue Sky represents the Liberal’s desperate desires when they can’t find a good counterargument – they want to cancel the person who made the argument and as the article notes, the people who followed (who don’t always agree with the people they followed, which often happens on X / Twitter).
The end result will be an echo chamber of what Liberals desperately want to be true. Of course, reality will get in the way, but those who point that out will face censorship, as will their followers. This really picked up after 2016 when Hillary Clinton lost, but there have been other similar failures. With a platform that ends up out of touch and the censorship, there will be many more unpleasant surprises for the Blue Sky true believers in the years to come.