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Notes -
The users of Bluesky, a platform that promotes itself as X/Twitter but without hate speech, have been having a meltdown for the last few days over the presence of Jesse Singal on the site. He is literally the most blocked user on the whole site. The current state of affairs is that they no longer post violent fantasies of killing him, after the moderation team indicated that they don't see a violation of terms and services in his account activity, they graduated into violent fantasies of killing him coupled with his home address attached. There's also a change.org petition for banning him, and I believe there are videos of prominent activists filming themselves signing it.
Jesse, for those of you who don't know, is a cohost of the Blocked And Reported podcast dedicated to internet drama, probably most relevant to users here as the place where Tracing Woodgrains had a brief stint. Jesse is not unlike JK Rowling in the eyes of the activists, in that he's 99% onboard with the left agenda, but has some doubts about some details of transgenderism. Even less doubts than her, in that his opinions is that some children are definitely trans, but some others will come to regret medical interventions, so caution should be exercised. And that's enough to label him as a heretical transphobe for the Bluesky users.
What was the trifecta for an effortful enough comment, event, context, personal opinion? Well, for the personal opinion, I always thought that the idea of heretics as more reviled than heathens was somewhat self-indulgent, but I'm starting to believe that idea.
I mean, twitter also had ridiculous drama blowups of this sort. I'm not sure why it's newsworthy that resistlibs and SJWs do this; we already knew they did.
There is currently a bit of a question of whether bluesky will be able to pull the center away from twitter/x so this fight does kind of matter. We're going to learn whether people find the right wing stuff let run wild on X more obnoxious than the left wing stuff let run wild on bluesky. How this shakes out is actually probably of substantial importance.
I wonder, actually, if Twitter/Bluesky is an inversion of the old battle between neutral and conservative? Twitter is currently an officially-neutral-but-soft-right-leaning mainstream site, and the left defected from it to go and make their own space, which predictably went badly, and now is evolving much stricter and harsher purity norms than even pre-Elon Twitter had. They attract only the refugees from a right-slanted system, and so they get not only progressives, but the worst and most extreme progressives.
There's almost a schadenfreude in it - "Ha! Now you know how it feels!"
Unless, of course, Twitter craters even more. Other possible dynamics are right-echo-chamber-Twitter and left-echo-chamber-Bluesky, both of similar reach and power, which I would take to be the worst of all worlds; or Twitter collapses entirely and Bluesky takes its place as the default short-messaging platform.
Does Twitter even really lean right? Every left-leaning tweet I see gets an order of magnitude more likes than any right-leaning counterpart. People have claimed these are botted likes but that can't be the case for all of them.
Yes, it could.
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