The social media platform Bluesky has had a good year, to put it mildly. Since launching in 2023 as an invite-only community, then opening to the public in February 2024, it has quickly amassed more than 25m users and counting.
It still doesn’t have nearly as many as its former parent company turned putative rival, Elon Musk’s X (previously Twitter). Nonetheless, user numbers are continually growing, engagement is high, and the less quantifiable “vibe” is palpable, largely thanks to take-up among high-profile individuals and publishers since the US election.
A significant portion of Bluesky’s users are emigrés from Musk’s platform, angry at perceived misinformation, extremism and bigotry, as well as bots and spam accounts. Since purchasing the platform in 2022, Musk has changed many of the platform’s curation and moderation policies, and laid off many of the employees responsible for those issues.
One such employee was Aaron Rodericks. He previously co-led Twitter’s trust and safety team. One task he undertook was “hunting down nation-state actors that were manipulating elections”, he tells me. “Twitter in 2018 found out the hard way that Russian employees of the Internet Research Agency were day in, day out, logging into their offices in St Petersburg and manipulating the US election by pretending to be Americans.”
In August 2023, as Musk was restructuring the company, Rodericks posted on LinkedIn that his team at X was hiring more staff with a “passion for protecting the integrity of elections and civic events”. Enraged right-wingers soon found the post. Former Trump administration official Mike Benz claimed Aaron was assembling a “censorship squad”. Rodericks later lost his job at X, with Musk tweeting, “The ‘Election Integrity’ Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone.”
Now, mirroring the defection journey some of X’s users have taken, Rodericks has moved across to Bluesky, working as its head of trust and safety since February 2024. The fledgling startup comprises just 20 full-time staff—that’s over a million users per employee.
Speaking via video call, Rodericks appears excited but also daunted—keeping the new platform relatively free of misinformation and harmful content, when many users have flocked there specifically for that promise, is a mammoth task for a small team grappling with exponential growth.
The Bluesky community has, so far, made the job easier. “To be honest, the user base was not prone to misinformation,” he says.
Nonetheless, Rodericks and the Bluesky team have introduced various policies, including a default labelling of content that is considered incorrect, harmful or intolerant. Other controversial moderation features include the “nuclear block” function (which removes any interaction you’ve had with the blocked user), the ability to mute posts which contain particular words and tags and “mute lists” (lists which users can create, share and subscribe to, to mute various users at once).
For Rodericks, such technical solutions have grand philosophical implications. “I think it just comes down to philosophies of free speech,” he says. “The last couple of years have seen a paradigm switch into a ‘one size fits all’ approach that’s dictated to you by billionaires… [based on] the type of speech that the owner of the company believes in, and it is a take-it-or-leave-it scenario.”
“We are trying to take a different philosophical approach at Bluesky, which means you should have the ability to freely express yourself, but others should also have the ability to freely not listen to you.”
Rodericks’s conception of free speech is influenced by his background. “Being Canadian shapes a lot of my perspective. There’s enough of the American perspective in the world on a day-to-day basis. For example, in the Canadian constitution… you have rights and freedoms, but they’re not unequivocal.”
Some have criticised Bluesky for being an “echo chamber” or “safe space”, too dominated by left-leaning and liberal users whose views are rarely challenged. “I’m glad that [critics] consider it a safe space,” Aaron says, “and ideally it can be a safe space for them as well. The whole point of Bluesky is for it to be safe and welcoming to all users. I think the issue is some people are defining their identity by opposition to others and how well they can harass others and deny their existence. Bluesky may not be the right place for them.”
“I think what I learned from my experience at Twitter under previous leadership is that a number of users appreciate a safe and welcoming environment,” he adds. “Elon himself has other priorities. He believes in free speech absolutism… I think it’s a notable and worthwhile experiment, if that’s where he wants to spend his money and his resources. I just don’t believe in that philosophy for Bluesky.”
