Bluesky Must Enforce its Community Guidelines Equally
Over the past week, Bluesky’s Trust & Safety team has made several moderation decisions which continue to damage the trustworthiness and goodwill of the team both as stewards of the Bluesky community and as stewards of the ATProto Network. It is the purpose of the Trust & Safety Team to enforce this platform’s Terms of Service and Community Guidelines which prohibit illegal and harmful activity conducted on Bluesky in order to maintain social and legal credibility of the platform.
By allowing such a highly visible user to blatantly violate Community Guidelines, Bluesky endangers its future by repeating the same infamous moderation mistakes that Twitter made. Bluesky PBLLC does not have the same access to the large amounts of capital that Twitter did [1][2] and Bluesky was founded in a different social media regulatory landscape than Twitter was, so Bluesky’s Trust & Safety team must act with more forward thinking than Twitter’s Trust & Safety team did. The purpose of this project is to not recreate Twitter [3][4]. That is an incredibly important mission which should be defended rather than quietly forgotten. Now is a critical moment in the growth of the Bluesky platform to avoid the clear and obvious mistakes made by other social media platforms in the past. Bluesky must not continue the legacy of ill-advised ad-hoc special policy exemptions for self-identified journalists publishing without an outlet, as this undermines the presence of reputable news agencies and accomplished journalists who utilize the platform. Bluesky’s Trust & Safety team does not have the same journalistic qualifications and established credibility to determine which self-published stories distributed through this platform are considered newsworthy enough to be exempt from the Community Guidelines. To continue to do so would be to re-implement the same infamous moderation mistakes that Twitter made.
In specific, Jesse Singal has distributed private medical information on Bluesky without the consent of the patient [5]. It is plainly obvious that Singal’s decision to use this platform to share private medical information is in violation of the first rule of Bluesky’s Community Guidelines: “Don’t use Bluesky Social to break the law or cause harm to others,” further clarified as “For example, do not: Steal or distribute others’ private personal information without their permission” [6]. Although the legality of Singal’s involvement in obtaining this private medical information has been debated, the information Singal uploaded in an image directly to Bluesky on December 8th is nonetheless private personal information that was distributed over Bluesky without the express permission of the owner of that information [7]. This is not denied by Singal, as he claims the information is not identifying (although this claim was made by himself and not by a reputable news organization), but he acknowledges that the information was obtained from medical records without consent of that patient [8].
In light of the repeated flagrant violations of Bluesky Community Guidelines by a user who has already been correctly suspended twice for separate Terms of Service violations, we ask Bluesky to permanently enforce its Community Guidelines against Jesse Singal. This is necessary to preserve public and professional trust in Bluesky going forward and to protect the privacy of members of the general public who have been harmed by actions that were conducted through abuse of this platform.
[1]
https://bsky.social/about/blog/7-05-2023-business-plan
[2]
https://www.nasdaq.com/press-releas...arter-and-fiscal-year-2019-results-2020-02-06
[3]
https://bsky.social/about/blog/2-7-2022-overview
[4]
https://bsky.app/profile/jay.bsky.team/post/3jnrntao6e22h
[5]
https://bsky.app/profile/jessesingal.com/post/3lcswnr6n6c2j
[6]
https://bsky.social/about/support/community-guidelines
[7]
https://bsky.app/profile/jessesingal.com/post/3lcswnr6r3c2j
[8]
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/gender-clinic-whistleblower-jamie
