‘Blue days, all of them gone’, Al Jolson sang, almost a hundred years ago. ‘Nothing but blue skies from now on!’ Mr Jolson’s sunny sentiments seem to have been oddly prescient. For 97 years later, the great and the good of the public sphere – well, at least the ones who never stop telling themselves and us how great and good they are – are decamping en masse from X (formerly Twitter) to rival social-media site Bluesky.
Bluesky aims to recreate the previous iteration of Twitter, before that awful, vulgar Elon Musk got his filthy mitts on it two years ago. Those were the good old days when the people who ran Twitter colluded with the FBI and suppressed any opinion slightly to the right of Hillary Clinton’s. In this alleged golden age, an army of faceless moderators would chuck users off for having the temerity to express hateful Nazi slurs like ‘there are two sexes’. Bluesky is the new go-to site for people who like peace, brotherhood and dobbing their neighbours in to the authorities. For people whose feelgood movie is The Lives of Others.
Having discovered that they are massively, disastrously out of touch – thanks to the Trump landslide – their solution has been to self-isolate, and to make themselves even more out of touch.
And thus, behold, the perfect Bluesky user:
More from Gareth Roberts of Spiked:
So, how are things over the wall, in the place where the skies are blue? Well, the sudden surge of users on Bluesky (though we must remember that X is also reporting all-time usage highs) hasn’t quite created the promised paradise. It turns out that snitchers love to snitch, wherever they go. Simple statements of fact like ‘sex is not a spectrum’ are, on Bluesky, swiftly labelled with the single warning word: ‘Intolerance.’ Intolerance of what, exactly? Delusion?
The sofa Stasi are certainly busy over there. ‘In the past 24 hours’, the Bluesky safety team posted last week, ‘we have received more than 42,000 reports (an all-time high for one day). We’re receiving about 3,000 reports [per] hour. To put that into context, in all of 2023, we received 360,000 reports.’ Then, in marvellously pompous language, they added: ‘We’re triaging this large queue so the most harmful content such as CSAM [child sexual abuse material] is removed quickly.’ What a great advert for your own site – the place is full of informers and child molesters. Grasses galore and nonces by the score – roll up, roll up!
Live look at the Bluesky trust and safety team in action:
UPDATE: Allan Lichtman, the man, the myth the legend, is back from his visit to the “Smugularity:”
