The Twitter files revealed in 2022 that, during the COVID pandemic, government was directing the censorship of dissenting public health authorities on social media. Since then, the question of moderation has loomed large.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter and transformed it into X (currently 600 million monthly users), he resolved to do without that sort of moderation. Staff were trimmed accordingly.

But that decision has not gone over well with all constituencies. At Platformer, Casey Newton advises that competitor BlueSky, founded by former Twitter head Jack Dorsey, has gone in the opposite direction:

Bluesky has decided to quadruple the size of its contract workforce of content moderators from 25 to 100, the company told Platformer. The move comes in response to Bluesky’s rapid growth since this month’s US presidential election, which triggered a fresh exodus of users away from Elon Musk’s X and over the weekend took the platform past 22 million total users.

In a sign of Bluesky’s growing vitality, Meta has recently copied a number of features for its larger rival Threads, including custom feeds and letting users view a reverse-chronological feed of posts by accounts they follow by default.

“Inside Bluesky’s big growth surge,” November 25, 2024

Scientists and science writers are now being encouraged to migrate to BlueSky.

Similarly, the European Union of Journalists “has decided to stop publishing content on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, from January 20, 2025, when Donald J. Trump will officially become the 47th president of the United States.” (Telegrafi)

A key accusation from the EU is that X “is the biggest source of fake news.” It wants Musk to “comply with the bloc’s laws aimed at combating disinformation.” (Associated Press)

As we’ve noted here at Mind Matters News, a great deal of misinformation and disinformation actually comes from government. This is an inevitable, baked-in problem and its effect is amplified when private sources of information of all kinds are censored.

Whither Threads?

We’ll see what happens with BlueSky over the long run. Actually, Meta’s platform Threads, may have more to worry about than X does:

“The race to replace Twitter has accelerated,” Jasmine Enberg, a principal analyst at the market research company eMarketer, told The Washington Post. “Threads has been the de facto home for many displaced [X-formerly-Twitter] users, but the surge of new users to Bluesky after the election has upped the competition.”

Currently, Bluesky has over 22 million users, up from 13 million in October. Threads, in comparison, has around 275 million monthly users — but it’s hard to shake the sense that Bluesky’s smaller user base is using the service far more obsessively than those at Threads, many of whom are likely signing up because of nagging reminders in Instagram.

Ashley Bardhan, “Zuckerberg Seems Genuinely Alarmed by the Explosive Growth of Bluesky,” Futurism, November 26, 2024

Tech writers tend to hate X and Musk in principle so they may be underestimating the basic assumption on which X runs: “Don’t hate the media, become the media.” The next few years will be most interesting.