Bluesky is hell on Earth

‘Blue days, all of them gone’, Al Jolson sang, almost a hundred years ago. ‘Nothing but blue skies from now on!’ Mr Jolson’s sunny sentiments seem to have been oddly prescient. For 97 years later, the great and the good of the public sphere – well, at least the ones who never stop telling themselves and us how great and good they are – are decamping en masse from X (formerly Twitter) to rival social-media site Bluesky.

Bluesky aims to recreate the previous iteration of Twitter, before that awful, vulgar Elon Musk got his filthy mitts on it two years ago. Those were the good old days when the people who ran Twitter colluded with the FBI and suppressed any opinion slightly to the right of Hillary Clinton’s. In this alleged golden age, an army of faceless moderators would chuck users off for having the temerity to express hateful Nazi slurs like ‘there are two sexes’. Bluesky is the new go-to site for people who like peace, brotherhood and dobbing their neighbours in to the authorities. For people whose feelgood movie is The Lives of Others.

Having discovered that they are massively, disastrously out of touch – thanks to the Trump landslide – their solution has been to self-isolate, and to make themselves even more out of touch.

The move is usually announced on X with a performative final flounce – see, for instance, the Guardian or Adric from Doctor Who – together with the revelation of their new Bluesky handle. This often comes with a pained little whinge about disinformation, hate and how jolly awful Musk is, etc. Some of the flouncers have stuck to their guns, so far anyway. But others, like that oh-so-reasonable and always wrong ex-BBC journalist Jon Sopel, have doubled back almost immediately, like people who pack in smoking for good on Tuesday night and are seen puffing away on Wednesday morning because actually they only said they were cutting down.

So, how are things over the wall, in the place where the skies are blue? Well, the sudden surge of users on Bluesky (though we must remember that X is also reporting all-time usage highs) hasn’t quite created the promised paradise. It turns out that snitchers love to snitch, wherever they go. Simple statements of fact like ‘sex is not a spectrum’ are, on Bluesky, swiftly labelled with the single warning word: ‘Intolerance.’ Intolerance of what, exactly? Delusion?

The sofa Stasi are certainly busy over there. ‘In the past 24 hours’, the Bluesky safety team posted last week, ‘we have received more than 42,000 reports (an all-time high for one day). We’re receiving about 3,000 reports [per] hour. To put that into context, in all of 2023, we received 360,000 reports.’ Then, in marvellously pompous language, they added: ‘We’re triaging this large queue so the most harmful content such as CSAM [child sexual abuse material] is removed quickly.’ What a great advert for your own site – the place is full of informers and child molesters. Grasses galore and nonces by the score – roll up, roll up!

The attempt to create a ‘nice’ version of Twitter misunderstands, I think, the very nature of social media. A social-media platform is really a microcosm of the internet. It’s a combo of toilet wall, magazine, 18th-century coffee house and 21st-century football terrace, all at the same time. It is no respecter of genre or of taste. A solemn and heartfelt remembrance will be followed by someone cracking a tasteless joke, or a video of a cute moggy, or a machete fight. It is eternally, definitionally crass and inappropriate. It cannot be otherwise. And crucially, each user curates their own experience by choosing whose content they see, with the power to block anyone they don’t like. If people are seeing lots of ‘hate’ – and that word now covers everything from actual horrible racism to the utterly reasonable thoughts of JK Rowling – it’s because they are choosing to see it.

The idea has emerged that social media, and X in particular, encourages political extremes. This argument would carry more water if the extremes of what I suppose we still have to call ‘the left’ weren’t baked in across Western institutions. These supposed sensibles and grown-ups are exponents of far, far nuttier things than anything that, say, Nigel Farage has ever, or could ever, cook up. These are people so nuts that they have made Donald Trump seem like a shining beacon of decorum and sanity.

Anybody who self-IDs as a kind, nice person on the right side of history is almost always a status-craving sociopath who will say anything, tolerate anything, to stay in their tribe. Men can literally take over a breastfeeding charity to satisfy their fetish for babies sucking at their nipples – as was exposed earlier this week – and the ‘kind’ people will say nothing for fear of status loss.

And they’ve forgotten, or are unwilling to confront, the simple fact that pointing and laughing at ‘characters’ on the opposing side – whether that be Steve Bray or Owen Jones, Jolyon Maugham or Darren Grimes – is fun. It is good for morale.

What would the #BeKind crowd do if they ever achieved their aim of a pure, high space above the fray? You can’t feel superior if there’s nobody to feel superior to. They need their out-group, for how else would they know that they are the in-group? All they can do then is turn on each other like starved piranhas.

They are the most rancorous, disputatious people on the planet. Now they are rats in a sack. Bluesky will only drive them insane. More insane.

Gareth Roberts is a screenwriter and novelist, best known for his work on Doctor Who.