Update: After this article was published, Bluesky restored Kabas’ post and told 404 Media the following: “This was a case of our moderators applying the policy for non-consensual AI content strictly. After re-evaluating the newsworthy context, the moderation team is reinstating those posts.”
Bluesky deleted a viral, AI-generated protest video in which Donald Trump is sucking on Elon Musk’s toes because its moderators said it was “non-consensual explicit material.” The video was broadcast on televisions inside the office Housing and Urban Development earlier this week, and quickly went viral on Bluesky and Twitter.
Independent journalist Marisa Kabas obtained a video from a government employee and posted it on Bluesky, where it went viral. Tuesday night, Bluesky moderators deleted the video because they said it was “non-consensual explicit material.”
Other Bluesky users said that versions of the video they uploaded were also deleted, though it is still possible to find the video on the platform.
Technically speaking, the AI video of Trump sucking Musk’s toes, which had the words “LONG LIVE THE REAL KING” shown on top of it, is a nonconsensual AI-generated video, because Trump and Musk did not agree to it. But social media platform content moderation policies have always had carve outs that allow for the criticism of powerful people, especially the world’s richest man and the literal president of the United States.
For example, we once obtained Facebook’s internal rules about sexual content for content moderators, which included broad carveouts to allow for sexual content that criticized public figures and politicians. The First Amendment, which does not apply to social media companies but is relevant considering that Bluesky told Kabas she could not use the platform to “break the law,” has essentially unlimited protection for criticizing public figures in the way this video is doing.
Content moderation has been one of Bluesky’s growing pains over the last few months. The platform has millions of users but only a few dozen employees, meaning that perfect content moderation is impossible, and a lot of it necessarily needs to be automated. This is going to lead to mistakes. But the video Kabas posted was one of the most popular posts on the platform earlier this week and resulted in a national conversation about the protest. Deleting it—whether accidentally or because its moderation rules are so strict as to not allow for this type of reporting on a protest against the President of the United States—is a problem.
Bluesky is BS
Cue up Pulp Fiction conversation about foot massage.
Simple solution to all this crap:
MASTODON.
I do not understand why people use BlueSky We already had the alternative!!! It was here first and many had already created accounts… Then just went back to Twitter
- Bluesky is more easily usable
- More people they want to follow are on Bluesky
Instead of complaining we need to work on making Masto more welcoming to new users and amplifying the advantages it has over Bluesky
Honestly, that ship has sailed, I think. When Musk first took over Twitter and everyone was bailing, if Mastodon was a viable alternative it could have taken off.
Now that Bluesky has overtaken them, and is seen as the alternative to Twitter, I think the opportunity has been lost.
That’s quite a good point. Here’s a little thought experiment, though: If we woke up tomorrow and Mastodon looked just like Bluesky (but with a different color scheme) and featured 100% two-way integration with Bluesky…
Essentially, if Mastodon became hands down the most user-friendly and engaging option—would that be enough to make a meaningful difference in its adoption curve?
Possibly, although anyone who already has an account on Bluesky would likely stay there, and Bluesky has the upper hand in name recognition, and there is the uphill battle of explaining the concept of federation to people who have little interest in technology.
And that’s if, hypothetically speaking, Mastodon was as easy to use.
It’s not happening. Also, if it’s anything like here, the non stop Linuxposting would probably annoy people.
It was far faster and easier to build up a feed of enjoyable content on BlueSky. My Mastodon feed has sat almost completely empty, and I’ve only been able to find a few news-reposters there.
And I’m tech-savvy. Imagine how it is for other social media users.
Yes, exactly this. Like something might be technically better but unless it’s doing its main job of actually connecting people it’s not going to work.
I wish more FOSS nerds understood this.
Many FOSS nerds don’t even understand the necessity of a user-friendly GUI…
Some of them will actively advocate for user-unfriendliness to keep out the noobs which… I mean the number of psy-ops in the community has to be non-zero.
Yep, elitism is a huge problem. It’s usually the best for newcomers to refer them to only certain subsections of the wider community (for example Linux Mint forums) who you know to be very friendly and humane. Many other places are a cesspit, and don’t you dare criticize something technical. You’ll get at least 30% answers trying to shut you up.
<rant> In terms of the wider Fediverse, people seem unable to understand how many people won’t even know you can use third-party software with certain services so not finding a native, official “Lemmy” app in the app store is a dealbreaker for them. Hell, our digital education and modern mobile devices are so bad & manipulative at times people don’t even know that “gmail” and “email” are the same… but of course that’ll be blamed on literally everyone else. Can’t be that that FOSS Bros are out of touch or something. Contributing to a social & economical solution is hard, let’s go back to our code cave. </rant>
I don’t agree that Mastodon is technically better, but it was first so it should have first mover advantage.
I think it largely comes down to marketing. Mastodon is marketed by word of mouth, and BlueSky has an actual marketing team.
By “technically better” I mean it actually delivers on its technical promises of decentralisation, as opposed to bluesky that simply uses decentralisation as a buzzword without being actually open source and without allowing real competition for the main - centralised - instance.
I think mastodon has actual legs in that if bluesky fails to actually open up, it will enshittify and there will be another exodus. Mastodon has technical barriers to that kind problem, so it will still be there to pick up the pieces. The decentralised nature protects the network from enshittifying and means it will tend not to get exoduses like central platforms do. It’s a matter of making that growth count.
If in that time mastodon has worked on its discovery features, it might be finally ready to capture that growth.
If bluesky manages to properly decentralise then I imagine mastodon will not need to pick up the slack and will either join the network or fade into irrelevancy.
Hard to say which way it will go. I don’t hold out a lot of hope for bluesky changing its ways, and who knows when mastodon will improve in this way.
Bluesky will never be able to properly decentralize, since the costs are prohibitive and cannot be afforded by normal users. The shared heap concept used is currently somewhere around 10-15 TB storage, which is already pretty expensive to host for a single person, and that’s only the STORAGE for a single host NOW - no redundancy, no backups, no traffic and no worldwide infrastructure to keep the response time down. That’s a huge difference to a Mastodon instance, which can be run from a pretty cheap setup and is afforable for most people.
Also, the way Bluesky implements how user identities are handled makes account migration more a theoretical possibility than a believable “decentralization”. Theoretically Bluesky gives a credible exit strategy, where the shared heap can be copied by another organisation in case of loss of user trust or bankruptcy of the company and everyone can just switch over and carry on without losing a single post, but there are a lot of big if’s in that theory.
Here’s the source, from Christine Lemmer-Webber who worked on ActivityPub: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
My understanding is that BlueSky is distributed, meaning there’s no single point of failure and nodes are independent. So scaling up should just mean adding more nodes, not having to scale vertically.
Distributed computing is a form of decentralization where the goal is resilience of the platform, not decentralization of control. The goal is very different from the Fediverse, which is to decentralize control, with resilience being a nice side effect.
Mastodon has technical barriers to that kind problem
It also has technical barriers to widespread adoption, hence why BlueSky is winning. I’lf BlueSky fails, people will just go to whatever alternative has a healthy marketing budget and low barrier to entry.
It doesn’t matter how distributed the servers are. You could say any centralised platform is “distributed” if it has at least one redundant server, which plenty of them do. Youtube has servers all over the world. That has nothing to do with enshittification and it’s not the feature I was talking about.
The thing that supposedly set bluesky apart was that they would be using a decentralised protocol that allowed anyone who wanted to to operate their own server with full control over their data. You can actually see some people posting from different domains.
That’s a nice idea and it trades on the rising popularity of the fediverse, but it’s not doing it in an open manner because the software isn’t open and separate instances are locked to 10 users maximum unless the central authority allows them more. That means it’s not meaningfully decentralised, but it’s still trying to capitalise on the concept. It can still be torpedoed by one company’s bad business decisions.
That’s what I was referring to.
And I said mastodon might be able to take in the exodus if they improve, so I guess I agree with your last point.
Same discussion in every single post on either Mastodon or Bluesky.
Love mastodon but Bluesky has a lot of cool features like starter packs and lists and feeds + the ability to do your own moderation. It’s really customizable that way + there a lot of users… In the end people will go where people are. Besides, mastodon is cool because its still underground and is filled with nerds like the early internet. Do we really want all the normies to join?
Once again proving it isn’t really decentralised.
How so? Lemmy is technically decentralized and mods remove stuff here…
You can just move to another server and repost it.
With blue sky there is no “another server”
Mod actions propagate though, no? So you’d have to post to a separate community, not just another server. I guess your admin could override a mod, but that’s quite rare.
I was more thinking about mastodon, since it’s the closest competitor to bluesky, but yeah here you would want to post it in a community on another server.
I don’t think anyone claims BlueSky is decentralized, just more fair about moderation. I’d probably be fine with using Twitter if Elon Musk hadn’t completely corrupted it.
At least in the US, protest falls under protected speech and has additional legal protections beyond ordinary speech similar to satire. IANAL but this is not a legal matter. It’s clearly an internal policy issue.
This is the problem with any social media being centralized.
BlueSky is just as centralized as Twitter or Facebook.
fwiw they restored the post and blamed it on a moderator being too strict in applying a policy regarding non consensual ai porn. It’s objectively good they have policies banning such things but it was completely obvious from context that this was not meant to be pornographic at all
As such, one could easily read it with cynicism as responding to backlash as they only reviewed said moderators actions after this article came out and the associated clamor
Poor moderator probably had a foot fetish
Or more likely a Trump fetish.
Amazed people saying it is correct decision! This is two public figures and doing art or any form of expression material with their image should be protected under freedom of speech.
I don’t believe Bluesky is a part of the government. Legally, they are allowed to censor as they please on their own platform.
Correct. this is indeed the correct decision to remove the thing. BUT i have a feeling that this quick reaction does not compare to the speed of decision for normal people, especially women who get this kind of stuff made about them.
Also, note that I’m not saying it was bad to make the video, or have it run in public on hacked screens.
That is perfectly fine political commentary, by means of civil disobedience.Just that Bluesky is correct in it’s action to remove it from their service.
I’d expect a little more enthusiasm from our Commander in Chief…
He’s old and tired.
Where can I download a copy? I would upload it again, hate any sort of censorship?
Yeah guys, fuck bluesky.
Already showing its true colors of “We’ll abuse our power when we want to and only reneg if there’s sufficient backlash.”
Recommend MASTODON, NOT BLUESKY.
If you allow it for people you don’t like, where the bar for others.
Not a fan of the AI video but this kind of thinking is very very stupid. Take that cop out of your head.
Re-upload it 100 times over…fuck em
First part yes, upload it anywhere and everywhere. Second part no, they’re not required to leave it up and accept any legal liability, so just keep putting up new copies expecting they’ll get removed.
Throw it on peertube/other platforms. haha
Bluesky will become just the same az elonx…
It already is
please stop being weird and gross
also please no more ‘look bad person do gay’ content
You needlessly choose to take offence. It shows who is sub and who dom. It doesn’t matter, except to you it seems, what sex they have
You needlessly choose to take offence
KKK
No, they literally make a choice to make it about being gay and I honestly don’t think that many people even thought about that aspect. I don’t even know that they aren’t gay for all I know, I don’t care.
Yeah. The means must absolutely align with the ends, and this video reeks of privileged white guy mad that he got his cushy desk job in DC ripped out from under him.
Whoever made this shit is no comrade and I’m sick of liberals sharing this everywhere
The fact that a .world is aruging to use this weird homophobic video as a protest is just proving your point.
It’s like how people think sharing that one image of Putin with drag make up is somehow a Gotcha to Putin, who probably doesn’t even care. Wow, ya sure showed that dictator by posting a meme that uses gay stereotypes!
Yeah, .world gonna .world
“You’re not protesting the right way! You have to stand up to them only in ways that are acceptable to me!”
Got it buddy.
A protest is throwing a brick through a window. This ain’t no protest.
It is unanimously considered a protest. Why do you think you decide, not the people?
Cause people are fucking stupid. You’re a great example
Communism 101
Yeah I hate Musk and Trump for lots of things. I don’t think using “haha they might be kissing each other! Musk sucks Trumps dick!” is somehow effective criticism of actual fascists in office.
Maybe we can criticize and protest and organize without using shit rooted in queerphobia. Might as well just say “Well Trump probably cross dresses, that shows him!”
it’s #darkwoke, the only people who are offended by this are the Nazi’s, and that is exactly who we should be offending
I don’t think using “haha they might be kissing each other! Musk sucks Trumps dick!” is somehow effective criticism of actual fascists in office.
It is, for them.
Especially having Trump be “the bottom”.
Ever watch Shameless, the US version? Its along the same lines as Terry, Mickey’s dad. He only hated Mickey because he was catching, because “It aint gay if you’re doing the fucking, just if you get fucked”.
So, in this case, yes, making implications of gay sex happening, with Trump catching, is VERY effective at it.
It is, for them.
Fucking crazy you think this is making them sweat at all
all you’re doing is giving them completely valid ammo that liberal ‘virtue signaling’ is completely hollow because look at your hypocritical behavior
not to mention telling all the queers you snarl at every 2-4 years to vote for you exactly how you feel about them
Queer and trans friends of mine were also laughing their asses off at this video…
And yes, calling out Trump as being the “beta cuck” to Elon DOES cause discomfort for a narcissist like Melania’s husband.
And it’s the sort of thing to push, to cause fractures in the white house.
I don’t know, man. Seems to me conservatives let shit like that fester, while ignoring it (or further festering it) while they do the real dirty work in buried headlines.
They let us have the fun while they quietly pull everything out from under us.
But, at the same time, it’s just going to happen. People are frustrated with very little perceived outlet.
Let me use another example: calling them “weird”.
It doesn’t matter to a rational person if another person calls them weird.
It matters to Reich wingers, who base their whole self identity on “matching the ideal”.
Put it on Facebook! Ol’ Zuck decided all the guardrails pretty much needed to go so. Post and do whatever. Plus, the people who should see it most are those still hanging around on Facebook 🤣
