Free Speech vs Platform Rights
Free speech. Do platforms have to respect it? People's answers seem to change depending on whose speech is at stake. In one moment, people will champion free speech, even on large platforms, whereas in another, they will declare that it is a platform owned by a private company and they can do whatever they want.
For this, it is worth separating out two different concepts that are being conflated here: free speech as a legal matter; as protection from government action and inscribed in the First Amendment, and the actual underlying principle that inspires it, and other similar laws around the world.
It is true that companies have no legal obligation to respect your 'freedom of speech' because they are not the government and suppressing you or kicking you off their platform isn't a violation of any law. Morally? You could perhaps say that you even have the moral right to kick off someone who using your servers that you own in a way you see fit. Why should someone be able to put data on your own server and use your electricity and resources?
But social media sites aren't just the homes of private citizens or pubs on the corner of the street. A large amount of our discourse takes place there; important discourse that influences what we buy, what we believe, and how we vote.
During the development and rise in recognition of the importance of Freedom of speech, the existence of this technology wasn't taken into consideration.
But now we find ourselves in this reality and two sensible, but conflicting, lines of logic.
The Town Square
Many have taken to likening social media sites to the "Town Square" of the internet. And, as such, even if owned by a private company, should be subject to the principle of free speech. Elon Musk hopped on this bandwagon and heavily criticized the practices of platforms like Twitter for their censorship, or alleged interference with elections, lack of impartiality, or imposition of values.
Or the infamous Twitter files, which was supposed to reveal this deep state control, showing select ominous email leaks with lists of tweets to strike. But if one hunts these down these links on the Way Back Machine, they are in for a little surprise. Very clear violations of the TOS, and I'd hardly call a company taking down pictures of a president's family member's genitals a violation of my rights. You would also assume that for such an atrocity, Elon Musk would have released the entirety of the files to the public to have various journalists able to parse through all of the data rather than a few handpicked journalists who could selectively handpick data to release to craft a narrative as Dorsey critisized him for. Especially when the lead journalist had a falling out and revealed his selectivity in withholding critique of Elon. As well as being under an agreement to post it on twitter first, a move which prioritizes platform engagement rather than actual ease of access for information, because Twitter is absolutely ASS for long form.
And yet, Elon clearly does not believe the values he purports to believe in himself.
He removed filters for various words, but then included one for the word 'cisgender,'
curbed the previous exodus by prohibiting the promotion of other social media sites,
and just deboosts links in general
which dramatically lowers engagement, discourages leaving the site for actual source material, and keeps people on the platform.
Meanwhile, ads are boosted (whatever advertisers remain after he has told them to fuck off then tried to sue when they did just that.)
If we take a look at this town square, people can shout all kinds of obscenities, but they cannot say "cisgender". You can't invite people to other places. If you mention the address of another place, you get muffled.
You might huddle up with a group of your buddies, but you can hardly converse or hear them over the loudspeaker that was given to conspiracy nutjobs, fascists, and to the Kremlin. The owner of the townsquare himself also speaks on a speaker above others; himself promoting one particular candidate.
You can also pay this owner for a megaphone and a badge. Someone might say "but you can bring a real megaphone to the real town square." Sure, but here you can't purchase it from anyone else. You can't make your own. You have to pay X.
A New Contender
Meanwhile a new contender for Town Square has emerged. One that doesn't get the credit for being a Town Square that it deserves. People both on the right, on X, as well as people on the left who swarmed to Bluesky often repeat the same idea, but with different flavors: that Bluesky is this echo chamber safe space which censors dissenting opinions.
This fails to understand what Bluesky really is and it does it a disservice to allow it to be defined that way. I will go over a few of the following:
-
The Protocol & Data Sovereignty
-
The Blocking feature
-
Feed Selection
-
Composable Moderation
The Protocol & Data Sovereignty
Bluesky is a platform built on something called the ATProtocol. To understand what this is, there are two oft quoted analogies to help people understand. One way, which was often used to describe Mastadon (which uses the ActivityPub protocol instead which still kind of applies here), is to think of it like email.
You can make your account with Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Proton, or you can even run your own mail server. And regardless of having a different provider, you can still communicate with people who have different providers. This is because they communicate through a common protocol which defines a set of standards to allow interoperability.
Another analogy (which I think is more apt for the ATProtocol) is to think of your account like being your very own website. When you make your account with bluesky, by default, it will make it on their servers. However, you have the option of making it on your own server or of transferring your account between servers if you don't like the service of your provider. The server that your data resides on is called a PDS, which stands for Personal Data Server. Your Account is called a Repo.
You can visit people's websites directly or you can potentially discover them through a search engine or indexer.
In the ATProtocol, this is what's known as a Relay which essentially builds a cache of all the data from all the PDSs. (For simplicity, I am combining a few different parts, the Relay, the AppView, and Feed Generators, which are actually separate things)
And then people can use an app, or a client, of which there are many at this point:
You can even make your own if you know how to code. You can fork the current open source Bluesky app and modify it to your heart's content, or go to an even deeper level.
If you have your own PDS, then Blue Sky Social PBC cannot touch your data. Have they suspended accounts? Yes, on their own servers they can. But a solution is built such that you have the option to be immune. In fact, they even have a motto of "the company is a future adversary", not just might be. The protocol is being designed with the assumption that, one day, some caricature of an evil billionaire will buy the company Bluesky Social PBC, but people can exodus from their servers, WHILST MAINTAINING ALL THEIR POSTS AND FOLLOWS/ CONNECTIONS.
This is a massive barrier to all known social media networks and is aptly named the "network effect". It's very difficult to leave a social media platform because of the network of people already on there, so you lose any sort of bargaining power and are entirely at the mercy of the platform. A big part of this is meant to defeat the network effect, so you are no longer beholden to a particular platform.
Caveats
Now before someone jumps in, there are still a few kinks to work out.
Running your own PDS isn't very expensive (you can do it for $5 a month; already cheaper than X's subscription) with far more control over your content, although with economies of scale, if you have a community on the same PDS you can severely reduce the cost so you are only paying a few dollars a year.
I have also come across some people running their own for $1 a month, or could be even cheaper if you run it on your own hardware at home.
And even then, because of its open nature, many free instances can open up, and so if you don't trust Blue Sky PBC, many more will pop up, and if you don't trust anybody at all, well like I said above, you can run your own very cheaply.
Now onto the kinks, and no, not the kind you might've stumbled on some Feeds of when going feed shopping:
Remember the Relay? The search engine? Hypothetically they could shadow ban you on this. This is where they have a model separating out "speech" from "reach". The "search engine" could hypothetically curb particular PDSs, users, or content, but afaik this hasn't been done yet, AND even if it is, even the Relay is replicable, it is significantly more costly to run, an individual probably couldn't do it, but a community of people could. It isn't expensive due to having to pay BlueSky themselves though, it's just the actual cost of creating a cache of the whole network.
The other kink is the Identity system, currently it is using a centralized directory which maps your DID, a key of random characters that is your true unique identifier, which all your content and followers is actually linked to rather than your handle, to your account. PLC originally stood for "Placeholder", because it is acknowledged to be a weak point which needs to be worked out.
Blocking
Those caveats aside, I also want to briefly touch on blocking. Often when people claim censorship, what they mean is people of their own volition blocked them. Now I will make another post at a later date with concerns about the abuse and potentially negative effects of irresponsible use of block lists, but for now, with respect to the topic of the town square and freedom of speech, it is wild to consider people's ability to block as a violation of your free speech. You have the right to speak, but you don't have the right to force people to listen. If people want to tune you out, that is their prerogative.
People are fuming because people have the ability to choose not to listen to them. To close the door and not let them into their houses.
Is it better to be in the first town square, where you are not allowed to cover your ears, even when certain content is clearly disproportionately blasted over others?
Feed Selection
In the new town square, you can invite people to a bar, to your science club, to your home, you hear the people around you, you can even choose your own Feed!
Whether you want to only ever see things from people you followed, whether you want it to be a strictly chronological feed, or have content that is hot rise to the top, see content by mutual for a more community feel, you can add various feeds by Bluesky or by third parties, anybody can create a feed which can act like a custom algorithm that anybody can subscribe to. You can even run your own, on a machine you control, to be certain you aren't being deceived and slipped in content you didn't want by their algorithm.
With X you are given their feed, even if Elon open sourced it, it's wildly complex and you have no guarantee that what's published at https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm Is what's running on the machines. You don't have the choice to change it either, you are forced to consume what they serve, injected with all kinds of slop you didn't subscribe to.
Even if someone wants to make the argument that this level of individual choice lends itself to creating echo chamber, it may be a fair critique but would have to concede that this is specifically due to the level of individual freedoms it grants an individual, and it certainly beats X, which is not the free open even playing field it's fans pretend it is.
Composable Moderation
Bluesky even has the option of outsourcing your moderation to third parties. Labelers are tools that anyone can make, and that you can subscribe to, which can "label" profiles and content. A Labeler can offer more than one label, and a user can subscribe to as many labelers as they wish, and for each label in each labeler, they can decide to turn the label off, have it show a warning, or hide it entirely. Some of these services are small, and as the network scales, it may not catch everything, but as time goes on, we should see the rise and fall and the emergence of a good set of labelers for various purposes. There is a labeler dedicated to labeling AI generated imagery or users who occasionally or frequently use AI, dedicated moderation tools for marginalized communities such as Blacksky and an Anti-Transphobia labeler.
Some other notable ones:
When you report content, you can also check box additional moderation places to report to, so if the main Bluesky team is overwhelmed, or if something doesn't break their TOS but does fit into a category of one or more of your subscribed labelers, you can report it to them seamlessly though the report button.
There are also labelers that aren't dedicated to warning about content, but could just be informative, or you can even self prescribe labels on some:
- Verified Check Mark by Hunter Walker for Journalists and large figures
- Self prescribe flags for nations, and other flags
- Developer labels to show programming languages
- Labeler that uses https://www.opensecrets.org data to label financial contributions to US Gov officials
- Self prescribed STEM field labeler
You can find more here
The Solution to the Conflicting Rights
Bluesky solves the problem we opened with. The private company can impose its own regulations on its servers. But you can use a different one and still intercommunicate with the same people.
Both rights are respected.
A technical solution that triumphs any temporary perceived benevolent dictator. A solution that is more rigid than laws, which can be changed, vary across countries, or just be simply disobeyed. Like the Second Amendment, which is predicated on the authority going rogue, or to defend yourself against those who operate outside of the rules, with a cold hard physical solution. Because that is the last line of defense.
After sorting out the few caveats above of course, even Elon Musk could buy Blue Sky, and it wouldn't kill its magic. I wouldn't leave it, just like I wouldn't stop using email if Google does something bad, or just like I still use HTTP even if people have bad websites.
A billionaire could buy the company, they can buy the platform, but they can't buy the protocol. The protocol would live on.
Of the two town Squares, which is truly more free? Which ones respects freedom of speech more? Which respects your individual rights more? Your right to receive content from those you follow? Your right to receive it in the order and manner you decide? Your right to send and read articles off the platform, to actually enjoy a platform that isn't incentivized to keep you on as long as possible?
Don't let them co-opt free speech.
Don't give in and say "Bluesky is a private company who can ban you and we choose this moderated platform". They CAN on their own servers, but we need to be careful not to associate that with the protocol.
You have that freedom to moderate and tune them out, but don't buy into the framing that this is what's happening. They have the freedom to host an account and to speak.
You just have the right to not be forced to listen.
