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2025-09-15 11:36:24 UTC

alecm on Nostr: ## I strongly suspect that Bluesky “content moderation” and “safety” is ...

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I strongly suspect that Bluesky “content moderation” and “safety” is following the same trajectory that Facebook did, and that “distribution” excuses it…In case you missed it: a bunch of people on Bluesky posted about the recent assassination/murder of a prominent right-wing American figure with a statement which in Latin* would be: *requi?scat in ur?n?* — and then they had their posts blocked:

https://bsky.app/profile/nathangrayson.bsky.social/post/3lynw7ennws2h

Truthfully: this sounds like the behaviour of a text classifier which — working from a small training set of postings made by challenging individuals — decided to go do a mass-takedown of offending content.

Colloquially: “a bot worked out that some words were ‘bad’ and took down everything containing them.”

Between this and the recent deployments of age verification [in the USA](https://www.theverge.com/news/775901/bluesky-age-verification-us-south-dakota-wyoming ) and [in the UK](https://www.theverge.com/news/704468/bluesky-age-verification-uk-online-safety-act ), I am wondering if Bluesky’s circumstances are so desperate to not run foul of Government attention / regulation / fines, that it’s taken to proactive and deep compliance in the knowledge that “the nerds will be okay, [they can just run up another PDS or implement client haxx and thereby circumvent the controls.](https://gist.github.com/mary-ext/6e27b24a83838202908808ad528b3318?permalink_comment_id=5690428 )“

That’s not a healthy way to approach bad regulation.

*[*] translated to confuse image text classifiers, just in case they’re still being zealous*

#bluesky #censorship #onlineSafety #onlineSafetyAct #surveillance