Why the fuck is a temporary suspension still ending up as a PDS-level takedown? Ok, sure, it should be back to normal after the given time. But that's not what was promised back in September (pfrazee.leaflet.pub/3lz4sgu7iec2k).

I do think the X feature that shows what country/region an account posts from is inherently pretty good and should be a standard feature on every social media website. It genuinely sucks that Elon Musk, noted shithead, is the one guy doing it.

PROMOTE YOUR BOOKS! EVERYONE WANTS TO HEAR ABOUT YOUR PUBLISHED BOOKS! www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/978...

he got a three day timeout for a month-old post lol

Silly me thinking composable moderation would prevent situations like this

How people react to uncertainty has far-reaching socio-political consequences: A new ETH Zurich study found that people who perceive uncertainty as an opportunity are less likely to vote for right-wing populists. ethz.ch/en/news-and-...

It feels like a lot of disconnect comes from the fact that what makes sense as operable policies for a scaled social media site has low relevance to what makes sense as norms for healthy society, despite our expectation that these should have more of a relationship.

I thought the @sarahkendzior.bsky.social suspension was an interestingly nontrivial moderation scenario. I wrote up a little case study/explainer on how it might have been handled on Mastodon. Probably only for people who care about moderation nitty-gritty. www.tbray.org/ongoing/When...

Sigh. I want to like these folks but I wish they would stop stepping on rakes. *taps sign, again*

Bluesky should really specify whether a suspension is temporary or permanent. @pfrazee.com @aaron.bsky.team

When you are a small social media site getting the same letter as Meta, Google, and TikTok, that's a sign that you're under a degree of scrutiny that is quite frankly terrifying, especially in this current climate!

It likely does not help that Bluesky was one of the six social media sites that got the letter from Clay Higgins, chair of the law enforcement subcommittee of the House oversight committee, about violent rhetoric after Charlie Kirk's death: clayhiggins.house.gov/2025/09/15/h...

Bluesky used to use a much less stringent threshold for removing violent rhetoric than they do today, and it changed to the current more-stringent policy early on, when a large number of users objected to hyperbolic violent rhetoric used against a prominent poster that was not moderated.

I believe the mods when they say they haven't finished the technical work necessary to automatically inform users of what posts they're being suspended for. I also believe that's not an acceptable flaw for this website in late 2025.

The upshot is that moderation employees can’t deviate from their playbook.

The implication of which is that every obvious copyright violation those discretion-exercising employees fail to deal with, with equal agency, opens the door to effectively unlimited liability to copyright holders whose works are infringed upon.

One of those reasons is an (‘ancient’ haha) bit of case law attached to Mavrix Photography LLC v LiveJournal, Inc. which delineates that employed moderators who have the ability and opportunity to exercise judgement on moderating content, also have A&O on obv. copyright violations

Trust & Safety moderation employees / contractors, for a significant number of reasons, are not afforded the ability nor the opportunity to exercise their own judgement. They are not volunteer moderators, (who can and should exercise discretion); employees must stick to a rulebook.

I think this kind of information is extremely useful to have when a platform suspends a high-profile public figure, and I'd much rather see people arguing about whether this is a good rule than, say, whether a journalist was banned for sharply criticizing an elected official.

The thread includes three statements we didn't know until now: 1. Rationale 2. Kind of mod action (72 hour suspension) 3. Notification was sent (No one but Sarah knows what notification she actually saw or exactly what it included—the team's said they're working on better emails.)

I want to restate something I said in a lot of replies yesterday, which is that this move is not going to reduce replies yelling at the Bsky team—and that should not be the goal. What it does is clarify how moderation works here so that people can assess that and act accordingly.

Bluesky suspended Sarah Kendzior today for no reason whatsoever. She just shared excerpts of her articles, which were as always incisive and not offensive at all. Hey @pfrazee.com this is super not OK. I know her- we've interacted a fair bit via chats and her work is essential.

This is a fun chart! The green is the main bsky load balancer traffic throughput from Saturday night, and the purple is how much traffic there was 7 days before (the previous Saturday) The spike is due to the world series - pretty incredible! ⚾

There was already a *lot* going on with Bluesky, and now it's under even more pressure. I wrote about how I think about moderation, affordances, expectations, human needs, and powerful trolls for @techpolicypress.bsky.social www.techpolicy.press/trump-admini...

Been arguing with myself all morning about whether this fits BlueSky's stated user control ethos or not. I've figured out why as a technical matter it does, but as a social matter eeehhhh.

🌐 From the first web page created in 1991… to 1 trillion web pages archived today. Every meme, blog, tweet & vanished site is part of our shared story. This is our collective memory. And it’s being saved. Join in our celebration this October: blog.archive.org/trillion/ #Wayback1T #WaybackMachine

Neat! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Posts about scientific research on Bluesky receive substantially more attention than similar posts on Twitter. More importantly, you're far less likely to get sexist or racist replies.

not at all surprising: arstechnica.com/science/2025...

"After two decades of sharing more online, it looks like we've decided to share less. New polling shows that nearly a third of all social media users post less than they did a year ago. That trend is especially true for adults in Gen Z." www.bbc.com/worklife/art...

Dead or 'unalive'? How social platforms — and algorithms — are shaping the way we talk. www.cbc.ca/radio/sunday...

I think it's now possible to make a poli-sci course that equips one for modern political analysis better than most classic theory and has a syllabus sourced entirely from random internet posts. Text 1. Wilhoit's Law, born as part of a 2018 blog comment crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/l...

I tried to put into (many) words something I've tried to put a finger on for years: everything is weirdly sexual now because nothing is allowed to be overtly, actually sexual anymore www.404media.co/egg-yolk-pop...

This is a fantastic article that I think helped me understand why puriteens constantly insist that everything is so sexual when overt sexuality is at what feels like an all-time low in my lifetime: With the biggest social media platforms banning porn, creators seek to eroticize everything else.

I think there’s something to be said about Bluesky’s lack of mainstream appeal. But the problem is “Bluesky with mainstream appeal” already exists: it’s called Threads. So the question is “How does Bluesky grow without becoming Threads 2.0?”

For the FT, I wrote an essay about why the daily experience of the Internet keeps getting worse, tipping us into madness and conflict. I gather ideas about slop, enshittification, and dead internet theory under what I call "the hostile Internet." www.ft.com/content/5d06...

my goodness these people truly have zero ideas left www.theverge.com/news/649246/...

Hate speech and the proliferation of extremism online have a chilling effect on online speech through intimidation and fear. A philosophy professor explains how restrictions on hate speech can support #freespeech rather than undermining it. buff.ly/0MKbF7u Michael Gregory, Clemson University

For anyone who hasn’t gotten into the habit yet: One thing about alt text is that it makes it MUCH easier to find an old post a few months from now. You’re not just making your posts more accessible for others today, you’re also doing future you a favor.

As Bluesky has grown, I've seen a lot of backsliding on alt text. Please try to be considerate to others and include alt text with all of your images. It helps everyone. Indeed, in the "accessibility" setting in Bluesky you can set it to make sure you add alt text, which is a useful thing to do.

Twitch is seen as a safe haven by some creators in marginalized groups, as platforms like X and Facebook/Instagram roll back content moderation. digiday.com/media/as-pla...

The Effects and Non-Effects of Social Sanctions from User Jury-Based Content Moderation Decisions on Weibo: https://osf.io/vbx65

YouTube CEO on content moderation: ‘Where the world was five years ago is very different’ than today” www.semafor.com/article/03/2...

"Bluesky’s Radical Idea: Let Users Set the Rules of Social Media" www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

So out of curiosity, what's the best accessibly written non-tome-length "this is the reality and these are the stakes of trust & safety/moderation/governance work at scale" primer that surely must exist to get understandably twitchy civilians across networks up to speed?

Once, Meta gave researchers like @davidlazer.bsky.social & @sgonzalezbailon.bsky.social an unprecedented level of access to data on content moderation and the spread of viral posts. Now, Meta is rolling back the protections they studied––and unlikely to greenlight more research.

maybe this will solve us china relations or maybe this is an actual natsec concern that we have yet to understand restofworld.org/2025/tiktok-...

One thing abt Meta's changes I haven't seen as much commentary on is the process. Meta spent years being all "heavy is the head that wears the crown" and setting up the oversight board, citizens assemblies, consultation etc to legitimate decisionmaking. Psych! It is and will always be "Mark says".

This is really interesting from a T&S policy perspective. Of course, my personal preference is “if in doubt, leave it up” (because people can then decide for themselves whether to view it or not)