More Bluesky Blues: ‘We Draw Battle Lines and F***ing Enforce Them’

I wrote about Bluesky’s attempts to ban Jesse Singal earlier today. While I think the mob targeting him are a bunch of creeps, I understand why it’s happening. His reporting threatens their worldview and violates their sense of right and wrong. He is literally public enemy #1 on that site because he threatens the verities of a cult.

The same can’t be said for Michael Kruse. Who? 

Michael Kruse is a senior reporter at Politico who says part of his job as a reporter is to be open to talking with people on all sides. So this summer he opened an account on Bluesky though he didn’t stop using his account on X. It all seemed to be going okay until a few days ago when he got a message from Bluesky saying his account had been shut down.

“A Bluesky account you control,” read the unexpected message in my inbox the other day from the Bluesky Moderation Team, “has been detected by our systems as being spammy, fake, or inauthentic. … As a result, your account has been taken down.

But Kruse hasn’t spammed anyone or done anything inauthentic. He wanted to know why he’d been shut down so he asked. No one could explain it to him so he could only assume it had to do with a blowup directed his way over a quote that appeared in someone else’s story at Politico.

I linked to a piece by my colleague Nancy Scola. The headline: “Democrats Face an Existential Crisis on X.” The subhead: “Conversations with a dozen insiders point to a party that is unsure about whether to leave or engage with the increasingly MAGA platform.” I, for my part, pointed to a quote in the piece from a person identified as a Democratic communications professional: “Leaving X because you don’t like Elon is the kind of purity politics that landed Democrats in this mess to begin with.” I’m not sure I totally agree with that idea, and I offered on the site, on purpose, no additional comment.

The response to the quote, again from a story he had not written, was a tidal wave of fury.

At last check, my post elicited more than 2,100 quote-posts and some 3,700 responses, a tally of interactions easily surpassing my number of followers. Almost all of the feedback was angry, and no shortage was directed not toward Nancy’s piece in general or the quote in particular but … me. Trigger warning here for readers with an aversion to gratuitous profanity and faceless aggression, but I was, in the words of Bluesky users, among many, many other things, a “f***ing dork,” a “f***ing wanker,” a “f***ing moron,” a “dumb f***” and a “bitch.”

After several days of this, Kruse began to wonder if Bluesky was really the safe space away from X that people were claiming it was. He reached out to the CEO and members of the Bluesky team but they ignored him. As he puts it, the closes thing he got to an explanation came from one of his critics who wrote, “Listening to people say the worst shit imaginable while others finger-wagged about “agreeing to disagree” is how we got into this mess. We draw battle lines and fucking enforce them.”

A few hours after he sent emails to the CEO, Kruse got another email saying the site had reconsidered and was restoring his account. No one ever explained why it had been taken down in the first place. Such a lovely place, Bluesky.