Armed with his experience at Twitter, and the current sorry spectacle in this area, Jack Dorsey is trying to reinvent the rules of moderation at Bluesky.
And the philosophy behind moderation on this social network that would like to take the place of Twitter is the same as that which governs the rest of the platform: let users decide. An à la carte system, therefore, which makes it possible to guard against most censorship lawsuits, but which does not, however, eliminate the site’s recourse to moderators.
How Bluesky works
If Bluesky’s graphic charter and display resemble, without even hiding it, what Twitter does, its content and moderation policy could hardly be further from it. Thus, in addition to posts from people they follow, moderators can tailor the type of content recommended to them as they wish. If it is possible to do everything by hand, the platform has planned to welcome third-party clients (another difference with Twitter) who already present lists of recommendations and content to subscribe to.
Bluesky presents this method as a means of making its platform a public good, which cannot be directly controlled by a company, here themselves, so as not to precariously overnight people whose lifestyle or work rests on it. And if its beta version was not there yet, the objective is to make this possible by making it a decentralized tool, in particular thanks to servers over which Bluesky would not have control.
Moderation at Bluesky
Given how Bluesky works overall, the company’s approach to moderation is therefore not really surprising. Indeed, the idea here is once again to let users decide the type of content or language they do not want to appear on their news feed, either by specifying it in their settings, or on a case-by-case basis. case when they see posts they don’t want. This will be made more readable through the creation of “labels”, which are tags that help contextualize the content of each post (nudity, spam, impersonation, etc.). These labels can be applied by the authors of the posts, or, again, by third-party applications.
But the big difference with what can be done elsewhere comes from the decentralized construction of Bluesky. Because if the platform has established community rules for the servers it hosts (for the moment, all Bluesky servers) and has therefore hired moderators to enforce them, those it does not host will not however, will not be obliged to comply.
If these completely à la carte communities certainly respond to a real demand to remove from the hands of social networks the power to choose the content that can be posted, it will also be a good way for Bluesky to dissociate itself from the abuses that will necessarily result from it.
Sources: The Verge, blue sky
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