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 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/
Oh, I didn’t realise the technical barriers were that steep. In that case I think I’m right to say that Mastodon is technically better for achieving the decentralisation it promises.
That’s a great resource, I’m going to follow them. Plus the link to Spritely was really interesting. Looks like it’s meant to be a successor to ActivityPub, which is quite exciting. From what I’ve seen activity pub is pretty limited in the ways it can enable interaction, like how mastodon posts look so funky on lemmy.
Plus, holy web 1.0, that’s a motherfucking website.