Bluesky Issues Warning to Any Users Celebrating Charlie Kirk Assassination
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Bluesky issued a warning to users celebrating the assassination of Charlie Kirk, sparking a debate on social media moderation and free speech, with some supporting the move and others criticizing it as too conservative or an overreach.
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At the same time, the exact words they used may not cover the problematic comments I saw, which were more coded:
> "Glorifying violence or harm violates Bluesky's Community Guidelines. We review reports and take action on content that celebrates harm against anyone. Violence has no place in healthy public discourse, and we're committed to fostering healthy, open conversations," the social media platform wrote in a post.
Nepal Prime Minister Resigns. Parliament / Ministires set on Fire. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45179679 - September 2025
Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45018773 - August 2025
Introduction to AT Protocol - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44965233 - August 2025
> In the early days of Bluesky, Black users felt they were being pushed off. Blacksky became a platform for Black users to feel heard and seen. To create Blacksky, we wrote our own implementation of AT Protocol (called “rsky” and pronounced “risky”). An underlying premise of Blacksky’s rsky is to not only “seize the means of production,” as well as the distribution, but to also act as a “dual power” structure.
> Blacksky’s rsky guarantees our community a seat at the table, and ensures that we can leave and easily make our own table if we need to. That’s the true promise of decentralized social media. [My note: Most relevant part, the rest included for context]
> Clearly I think that decentralization is great, not only for the problems it prevents, but also the new possibilities it creates. But if everyone’s running their own servers, apps, and moderation teams, how do we do global social media? That’s where our vibrant open source developer community comes in.
> Blacksky runs our own global relay at https://atproto.africa, which we built from scratch. Every day, our relay stores its own copy of the hundreds of gigabytes of data of all known AT Protocol accounts — 36 million and counting. We also developed what we call our “moderation relay,” which lets us know about all of the moderation decisions ever made by all mod teams globally.
Think of Bluesky not as a Twitter equivalent platform, but a funded experiment and incubator for bootstrapping a protocol where multiple platforms can operate independently of each other. You can scale a community to tens of millions of users for under a few hundred dollars per month in tech spend (storage, compute, transfer). This is very accessible imho.
Broadly speaking, I understand that there might be speech out there that I find exceptionally distasteful, but that is the speech in many cases (but not all) I am willing to protect, because you don't know when the capability to censor will be weaponized. This remains in constant tension so long as humans are humans. There is no solution, only constant evolution.
Now that some corporations appear to be shifting again and can't be trusted to censor only conservatives anymore (most notably Twitter after the Musk purchase) we're seeing the 20th-century expansive interpretation of free speech making a comeback on the left. Feels comfy, like an old pair of slippers.
(it was also amusingly the time in which the right went quiet on censorship on Twitter, for much the same reason).
Either way, it's become really apparent that most people don't have any consistent political beliefs or values, and only value freedom of speech so much as 'their' team gets to say what they want without consequences and their opponents get bullied and shut down at a moment's notice.
In the Twitter years the right could produce endless lists of right wing people banned from the platform, and we now know there were tons of internal emails and discussions about that exact policy. The fact that nobody could produce similar lists for the left post-Musk indicates that he really has significantly improved the free speech situation there.
If you don't, I would say it's because you've forgotten that the word "liberal" in American political discourse used to actually correspond at least vaguely to what traditional dictionaries, historically recognized classical liberal authors, encyclopedias of political thought, and basic logic and reason all used to agree on. As opposed to what it appears to mean now, which seems to be something approximately like "everything that's closer to what the DNC proposes than what the RNC proposes, at any given moment".
https://corp.rumble.com/our-story/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/20/what-is-r...
> Founded in 2013 by a Canadian entrepreneur, Chris Pavlovksi, Rumble was designed to be an alternative to YouTube for small content creators. But it quickly began to pride itself on being the opposite of other tech firms.
> According to Rumble’s website, it is “immune to cancel culture” and aims to “restore the internet to its roots by making it free and open once again”. Pavlovksi has described it as “neutral”.
> Rumble is backed by the billionaire and prominent conservative venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who invested in 2021, and the conservative former Fox News presenter Dan Bongino, who has 2.9 million subscribers himself. The platform is valued at more than $2bn (£1.6bn).
("what's good for the goose is good for the gander")
"In Marsh v. Alabama (1946), the Supreme Court ruled that a privately owned company town could not prohibit individuals from exercising their First Amendment rights to free speech and religion"
I'm not saying bluesky is the exact same, but it seems pretty damn similar to the private sidewalk that the Gulf Shipbuilding Corporation privately owned.
The level of cognitive dissonance when people lock themselves in echo chambers is truly astonishing.
You can literally scroll for hours, thousands of posts of people making the same sorts of outrageous and deflective claims.
https://bsky.app/profile/trending.bsky.app/feed/412019139
(But of course, it is only seemingly all of Bluesky; and of course it's very easy on social media to start filtering for this content once you first encounter it.)
I have seen nothing of the sort, and I have access to beyond-the-Overton-window right-wing sources. What they have been doing, instead, is pointing out the Bluesky users that TFA concerns itself with.
"cindyllm" is, as far as I can tell, an automatically filtered, AI-powered shitposter.
The repercussions of that are your own. Quite honestly, the repercussions are likely small in the long run if it helps to better establish civil norms and self governance.
It was inevitable, especially since Israel can reach out and kill whoever it wishes, without consequences.
Seeing the people on social media celebrating Kirk's murder is so saddening and maddening. I am shocked that social media has allowed such widespread celebration of the murder of a US citizen.
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