Bluesky: A Land of Unicorns, Rainbows and Death Threats

Last month I suggested that having all of the most woke/progressive people abandon Twitter for Bluesky was unlikely to produce a social media utopia. The problem isn’t the platform it’s the people using it who have set themselves up as unofficial content moderators for the space. If you violate their particular sense of woke propriety, they will do their best to drive you off with whatever wild claims and personal attacks they can muster. 

Ben Dreyfuss lasted all of two days there. Even famously left-wing director Rob Reiner was getting dragged for saying he planned to accept that Trump had been reelected.

The latest target of abuse at Bluesky is Jesse Singal, the journalist who has infuriated the left by writing about trans issues while refusing to knuckle under to the leftist groupthink. Some of the fine folks at Bluesky have started a Change.org petition to have him removed from the site…for reasons.

2/ They’re going after Hannah Gais, who works at the SPLC and who I knew foreeeeeever ago (People’s Republik RIP). She stands accused of not giving a straight answer as to whether she’ll sign (she’ll sign, I’m sure), and liking a problematic skeet.

FASCINATING community. pic.twitter.com/aHHG62yIf6

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) December 12, 2024

4/ One thing I’m curious is whether the open letter will contain the term ‘harm’

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) December 12, 2024

I don’t know what else to say at this point other than that this whole thing has been incredible. I had no idea it would be like this. I thought a few people would complain and then it would be normal.

Gonna be a very fun BARPod segment. pic.twitter.com/uZpURPtx2P

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) December 12, 2024

Naturally, his critics are openly fantasizing about his murder.

Thank goodness there is another platform to which we can flee to escape the toxicity of the Twitter cesspool! pic.twitter.com/Abm2VFdJzf

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) December 12, 2024

These are the people who left X because it was too hateful.

3/ Every single form of harassment that supposedly motivated the exodus to Bluesky — violent threats, defamation, and so on — it’s all so much worse and less moderated there. You can threaten to kill anyone you want, or call them a pedophile!

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) December 12, 2024

Singal has written a more serious post about all of this for his Substack. He points out that he is now the most-blocked person on the entire site. Out of 20+ million users (or whatever they’re up to now) he is the absolute worst of the worst. 

I quickly became the single most blocked account on the site and, fearful of second-order contamination, these users also developed tools to allow for the mass-blocking of anyone who follows me. That way they won’t have to face the threat of seeing any content from me or from anyone who follows me. A truly safe space, at last.

But that hasn’t been enough: They’ve also been aggressively lobbying the site’s head of trust and safety, Aaron Rodericks, to boot me off (here’s one example: “you asshole. you asshole. you asshole. you asshole. you want me dead. you want me f**king dead. i bet you’ll block me and I’ll pass right out of existence for you as fast as i entered it with this post. I’ll be buried and you won’t care. you love your buddy singal so much it’s sick.”). Many of these complaints come from people who seem so highly dysregulated they would have trouble successfully patronizing a Waffle House, but because they’re so active online, they can have a real-world impact.

They are also just flat out lying about Singal in an effort to tar him with scandal. Trans activist Alejandra Caraballo jumped in on this.

In since-deleted posts, Alejandra Caraballo, a famous trans activist and instructor at the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, reposted Cortland’s claim and asserted that I “posted intimate details about children’s medical records.”

“Those kids can’t get their medical privacy or their healthcare back,” she said in a follow-up post. “Many of them were forced to leave Missouri because of what Singal did publishing that. I hope he never knows a moment of peace.”…

Caraballo, then, argued that my alleged violation of these children’s medical privacy was so severe they had to move, that I should never know a moment of peace, that I should always have to fear someone confronting me in public over my heinous actions. These are unbelievably serious claims coming from a high-profile activist who, again, works at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (which once published a white paper titled “Interventions for Online Harassment of Journalists.”)

Singal then take a lot of time explaining in exhaustive detail where the allegations about him violating children’s medical privacy are coming from. I won’t go into the details but you can follow the link above to read them if you’re curious. Suffice it to say he makes a very convincing case it’s complete BS cooked up by people who want to punish him and just need an excuse.

The desire to expel him from the Bluesky clubhouse and punish him in the real world (straight out of the cancel culture playbook) is very real. In an era where people are being murdered in the street and the left is celebrating those acts as social justice, you really can’t afford to ignore the angry mob. How long before we have our first Bluesky-inspired political murder?