What passes for「 moderation 」on Bluesky is the very architype of arbitrary and capricious.
Founder and CEO Jay Graber is a technolibertarian who espouses ideals such as free-speech absolutism and a marketplace of ideas.
When anti-Blackness was rampant on her platform, she and the team had to be dragged kicking and screaming to implement blocking.
They initially outsourced moderation through the list of moderation lists to a community volunteer who - in fairness to them - seemed trustworthy enough, but was later shown to be abusing that position for personal grudges.
When they finally built what passes for a Trust and Safety team, things only went downhill from there.
The platform itself was built by a strong and thriving trans community who Jay and Aaron repaid by allowing malignant transphobe Jesse Singal to have his account restored after several gross incidents of encouraging harassment and worse and to take up perment residence on the site.
Meanwhile Palestinians in Gaza desperately reaching out for a lifeline on the platform have been met with targeted mass-reporting, unfair SPAM labels, and daily bans.
These sorts of problems in some form or another are endemic to every social media platform. The people running them have, at best, studied technology or computer science or business, but they know and care nothing of the Theory of Justice or Theory/Philosophy of Law.
They implement some form of moderation because their users demand it and because they are legally required to but becuase they don't care, don't understand these things, and see trust and safety and moderation as a waste and a nuisance they build shitty systems.
They do not understand nor care why it is important to have transparancy and so they build things that are opaque.
They do not understand nor care why due process matters and so their injustice is random and arbitrary and personal.
They do not understand nore care about the importance of an actual appeals process and / of course there is no transparency nor due process in their appeals process ( such as it is ) so reversals of unfair decisions are just as opaque and arbitrary as the decisions, themselves.
If you value anything you write or your personal connections, then I urge you not to rely on this platform.
Without notice or warning they almost immediately suspended me for the following:
I concede that was not the most diplomatic choice of language but given the circumstances I was holding back immensely.
