We Have To Think About Moderating X, Bluesky And Other Social Media
The anoymous psychos who call for others' assassinations are a direct threat to democracy and public safety. Threats are NOT free speech.
I didn’t wake up this morning in the Soviet Union! To cadge an old conservative belligerence from the 1980s.
If calling for the murder of people you don’t personally like isn’t despotic, oppressive hate speech, then I don’t know what qualifies. Luigi Mangione has outed the ‘progressive’ left (once again) as being every bit as vicious, malicious, and pro-hate speech as any uni-browed MAGA who wanted to rape Nancy Pelosi and hang the Vice President. They applaud the cold-blooded murder of a man whose role in healthcare they understand as little as they do who decides who’s denied coverage. They goad each other on with their Anonymous Coward Power by legitimating the call for others to murder their adversaries, since they don’t want to spend their own lives in a filthy prison with filthier examples of humanity eyeballing their butt.
Woke progressives are customarily so obsessed with ‘hate speech’ they perceive it in every verbal utterance, and won’t be happy, we assume, until every human being is rendered mute after declaring every word in Noah Webster ‘racist’, ‘white supremacist’, ‘anticolonialist’, ‘transphobic’, ‘toxic masculine’, or ‘anti-Swiftian’.
No, not Jonathan.
Woke ‘progressives’, unhappy with how the emotionally unstable Elon Musk has run X since he overbought the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, have flocked off to Bluesky. Those departing cite the preponderance of ‘hate speech’ on X and alleged censorship of themselves, by which they mean Musk doesn’t work too hard to police MAGA hate speech, or provide progressives an unencumbered hate speech online ghetto of their own.
On Bluesky, the new ‘kinder, gentler’ alternative to Elon Musk’s X, they can power-vomit however many death threats and doxxing spatial coordinates they like with near-impunity.
I’m not surprised. My own personal experience with another progressive experiment in ‘kinder, gentler’ social media with another then-Twitter alternative, CounterSocial, led to my getting kicked off for unspecified reasons, but it happened the day after I shared my article It’s A Sign Of The Apocalypse When The Right Supports Science And The Left Doesn’t.
Hate speech, clearly.
I figured Bluesky was, or would soon turn into, another fact-phobic, irrational and ideological woke-progressive shithole.
Nailed it.
Turns out Bluesky moderation is nearly nil. Supposedly, they’ve been kept very busy, having sorely underestimated the average amount of left-wing hate speech reports they’d need to investigate.
At the moment, they’re doing a piss-poor job, and have vowed to quadruple their moderators. Who knew kinder, gentler progressives could be so—hateful? Isn’t that, you know, a right-wing thing? You’d think open calls on Bluesky for murdering others post-Brian Thompson would be top priority, right?
Not so much for investigative journalist Jesse Singal, who’s pissed off the TransKlan for a decade critiquing largely science-free child sex change operations. So of course they called for his immediate and literal murder.
Singal was harassed and doxed on Bluesky for publishing his work, and reports that Bluesky dragged its ass on doing anything about the death threats. He’s been targeted for years by transactivists with a perpetual harassment campaign involving, besides threatened violence, countless lies and smears. For example, they commonly claim he should be banned for being a ‘pedophile’ with zero corroboration, which probably explains why he hasn’t been banned for this.
Singal claims X is better at suspending and removing violence-provoking accounts and threats, but not so’s anyone else can notice, which is why so many have left the platform or explored others while perhaps staying somewhat active on X. The former-Twitter wasn’t any more friendly to free speech under the auspices of co-founder Jack Dorsey, which might explain why Bluesky has become the pre-Musk Twitter; Dorsey founded Bluesky. Meanwhile, Musk famously found a closet full of T-shirts that pretty much validated the accusations of Twitter’s critics and which its staff, back when they had jobs, denied: That they were super-‘woke’.
Dorsey’s Twitter had been criticized for years as politically biased against, and censorious of, conservative and other opinions ‘unfavorable’ to the woke agenda. That much was true; back then, the quickest way to get banned was to annoy transactivists by saying something factual, as Canadian feminist and activist Meghan Murphy found when she was ‘permanently’ banned for identifying a trans-identified man using male pronouns. Such was the state of ‘hate speech’ and censorship on pre-Musk Twitter in 2018, which blithely ignored the years-long transactivist hate campaign against J.K. Rowling for her support of women’s right to be, and define themselves as women apart from those given a lifelong sentence of being male from conception.
Three years later, then-President Donald Trump was suspended in early January 2021 for allegedly ‘glorifying’ and ‘inciting’ January 6th violence.
After Musk took over he reinstated Trump soon after and Murphy got her account back eventually, too.
Let’s talk about content moderation
The gloves against any pretense of progressive civil society came off in 2023 on October 7th, when many ‘progressives’ unleashed their Jew hate like the unholiest Kraken, and more recently the disgusting Luigi love for the healthcare CEO killer. Progressive bigots made it clear that progressive hate speech was 100% acceptable after Hamas’s vicious attack, when, in the finest tradition of right-wing violent political expression, progressives donned their own swastika—the keffiyeh—and violently attacked all things Jewish, be they buildings or people, and justified it with the usual self-aggrandizing bullshit about how the victims ‘deserved it’. Very, very few ‘progressives’ challenged or stood up against the explosion of antisemitic ejaculate spraying humanity like a genocidal bukkake video.
Just imagine how they’d have reacted if Luigi Mangione had been a Christian right-winger who murdered a transwoman en route to the beauty parlor to get his balls waxed.
Pretty certainly, the toxic right would have exploded with near-similar hate on both platforms while progressives clutched their pearls and fainted on the Whole Foods Market Hot & Salad Bar floor. La plus ça change.
The naked calls for assassination force us to rethink anonymity, and the cowards who call for criminal acts without fear of retribution.
I write this not to call for censorship but to argue legitimate free speech stops at violent threats or encouragement of violence against others (including encouraging someone to commit suicide).
Most of which is banned under typical ‘Terms of Service’ or ‘Community Standards’, but mostly lackadaisically enforced.
X and Bluesky are positively medieval
In less enlightened times and places (medieval Europe and the modern-day Middle East), one could make anonymous accusations against others, not be required to provide a shred of evidence, and the accused would stand before a court that didn’t even rise to the standards of a modern-day ‘kangaroo court’.
It’s why the ‘Confrontation Clause’ was added to the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights stipulating that the accused has the right to face their accuser. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms also stipulates similarly unless the accuser is deemed ‘vulnerable’, such as from intimidating threats by the accuser or other safety issues.
But on social media, the normal rules don’t apply.
You can falsely accuse someone like Jesse Singal of pedophilia, and ruin peoples’ lives and careers with other anonymous lies. When you do libel or slander someone under your real name, as George Stephanopoulos was found liable for recently with Donald Trump’s successful lawsuit against him and his employer NBC News, there are consequences.
None for the anonymous cowards on social media claiming, as Stephanopoulos did, that Trump raped accuser E. Jean Carroll. Which has never been proven in court, even though he lost a defamation liability appeal which awarded her money, and then again when he defamed her under his real name on social media.
Dumbass.
Do we live in a dual-justice system, not the kind for the moneyed vs the poor, but where you can say damn near anything and get away with it as long as no one knows who you are?
Allowing people to blatantly threaten, or encourage threats to people they’ve deemed ‘evil’, or entire industries like healthcare, will do more to quell free speech and keep the entire population cowed into silence than any ‘cancel culture’ campaign we’ve seen in the last twelve years. Crazy extremists running around armed and dangerous represent the supreme coalescence of the very worst of the left and right to destroy what remains of democracy by ensuring no one dares speak truth to power.
Just like, you know, in Hitler’s day.
If content isn’t the responsibility of the platforms, and the federal government is constitutionally prohibited from moderating public speech, whose responsibility is it? Because what’s illegal offline shouldn’t be legal, officially or not, online.
Social media platforms have been accused many times, credibly, of doing a milquetoast job of policing genuine violent threats, so it’s up for legal argument whether they could ultimately be held responsible for pretty close violations of the First Amendment, a legal argument that hasn’t found much traction so far.
Anonymous accounts truly must be protected for whistleblowers and truth-tellers, but those whose truths contain more lies than truths should be accountable for libelous accusations. So far, the courts haven’t been supportive of verifiable identification for age. Theoretically, one might need to provide a driver’s license or some other ID to get an account not under their real name but currently, the courts haven’t ruled that way. But it’s what’s likely needed to hold users accountable.
If the DorseyMuskerbergs aren’t responsible for a post or tweet encouraging someone to kill the next healthcare CEO or investigative journalist, then the responsibility lies with the individual. That’s near-impossible under present circumstances.
A kinder, gentler solution would be to induce and encourage social media companies to hold their users accountable for their speech by offering tax incentives to those platforms which do an audited, verifiable good job of suspending or banning users who clearly violate their standards or ToS with clearly defined threats: “Here’s the address of a journalist whose work I hate, go teach him what the business end of a Glock looks like,” versus “I really wish someone would punch to death Joe Blow at the New York Times.”
Wishes aren’t the same as GPS destinations.
Elon Musk, Make People Pay To Be Assholes!
Encouraging or ordering others to kill without getting your own hands dirty, is ‘conspiracy to commit murder’, as Charles Manson found out in 1971. At least from a hippie commune in California. Not sure what would happen if he’d agitated for rich-people murders from @helterskelter1969.
Clearly, if you want to commit a murder, or get others to do it, sign up anonymously. No one will pay attention unless you directly threaten the President of the United States.
Peoples’ lives are put in danger on social media where it’s been horrifically clear for many years that many of its denizens suffer from serious mental health problems and a complete break with morality. What must happen before we take these obvious threats to the social order more seriously? When someone does, in fact, kill a journalist? Or another random CEO? Anyone deemed ‘evil’ by the self-appointed Holy Inquistitors becomes fair game. TERFs. MAGAs. Muslims. Immigrants. Feminists. Nickelback fans. Nickelback.
Today a healthcare CEO, tomorrow, perhaps, a Hamas campus cheerleader. Or an Israel supporter. Or a YouPorn star. Or a sex trafficker. Or a genderwoo-friendly school board member. Or you.
Pick yer evil, and then ask whether you really want to see a Death Wish world in which many self-appointed someones go around liquidating people they have deemed unworthy of life.
No arrest? No due process? No assumption of innocence? Every dystopian futuristic science fiction movie you’ve ever seen in which might makes right? A Boy And His Robo-Dog?
It’s begun on social media, a largely unregulated Wild West of opinions, expressions, false information, misinformation, wrong views, immorality, rank psychosis and a Dark Triad free-for-all.
I don’t yet know how this proposed content moderation would work. I don’t know or understand the legal technicalities established so far or in which direction we could take this drive to hold someone, or something, ultimately accountable for clearly unprotected speech that creates a clear and present danger to all of us. It’s probably premature anyway as we first must acknowledge there’s a problem before we can go about solving it.
Understand: I’m not arguing for censorship. I support your right to spew, but, knowing that someone at X or Bluesky or Facebook or Instagram knows exactly who you are, and will turn your contact information over to law enforcement upon request through the proper channels.
The progressives loooooove ‘consequences’ for ‘hate speech’.
Let’s properly define hate speech, and provide exactly that.
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When I’m not debating whether I should delete my account on Bluesky and replace it with my current anonymous sex-questionable profile from X, I help women and others reclaim their power here at Grow Some Labia.
I got hundreds of death threats DMed to me on Twitter and no one did anything about it. It was all right wingers who hate Scott Wiener.
There's an illuminating video snippet of Don Lemon (late of CNN) and Elon Musk (currently of Earth) discussing online moderation/censorship. You should watch it and think about it. At around 30 minute mark of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhsfjBpKiTw