I have never visited Bluesky, the left-wing version of X, so I was unaware of just how toxic and cruel the people on Bluesky could be.
Bluesky users aren't only targeting the right in their "skeets," as their postings are called. They target anyone who disagrees with their narrative about the "oppressed," especially transgenders.
It's not just transgenders, of course. The whole victim culture has found a home on Bluesky. Not only the victims themselves, who know that they enjoy an "elevated moral status" on Bluesky, as Yascha Mounk points out. But the radical left posters see themselves as defending the oppressed. To do this, they make death threats and other threats of violence against their targets.
In many ways, it makes X look like a coffee klatch by comparison.
Bluesky bills itself as a "safe and welcoming" place, and brags about the large number of moderators who supposedly police the site. It's baloney, of course. Indeed, as long as the threats and blood-curdling, hateful language are directed against a "worthy" target, the moderators don't bother with them.
A left-wing writer, Jesse Singal, wrote a compelling article in The Atlantic about detransitioners and other controversial LGBTQ issues. The threats were appalling, worse than anything I've ever seen on X.
“I think Jesse Singal should be beat to death in the streets,” one wrote. Another wrote: “Jesse Singal and assorted grifters want us dead so I similarly want him dead,” another user wrote
And there's much worse — much of it is too obscene to post here.
There's a culture of just total impunity over there when it comes to violence. On Twitter, as far as I can tell, it's rare for people to post violent threats or musings under names identified with their IRL identities. Over there, they know they can do so without any risk. pic.twitter.com/3xRWdAo3Kl
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) December 15, 2024
Though they blatantly violated Bluesky’s restrictive community guidelines, the platform hardly took action against such accounts. It even failed to ban users who shared what they believed to be Singal’s private address or made especially graphic threats against him. Evidently, the people making decisions for the kinder, gentler platform don’t mind actual death threats—as long as they are directed against those who, in their judgment, have it coming to them.
What can possibly explain the descent of a platform populated by progressives who claim to abhor all forms of violence into an echo chamber that revels in violence against anyone who defies its taboos or threatens its ideological conformity?
“Claiming one is a victim has become increasingly advantageous and even fashionable," wrote Ekin Ok and three coauthors from the University of British Columbia in a 2021 paper. The thesis the authors advance is that Western democracies have become so responsive to the needs of the people perceived as "victims" that claiming the mantle of victim allows them “to pursue an environmental resource extraction strategy that helps them survive, flourish, and achieve their goals.”
The paper’s second striking empirical finding shows that the tendency of people with dark personality traits to falsely claim being a virtuous victim may also give them cover for engaging in bad behavior. In another experiment, they asked respondents to play a simple coin flip game, which was manipulated in such a way that its participants could easily use deception to increase their monetary payoff. It turns out that people who have portrayed themselves as virtuous victims were far more likely than their peers to lie and to cheat.
Leftism is an ideology that attracts anti-social psychopaths, because it excuses their behaviors as "normal." It also allows for "righteous anger" to mask a pathological personality, and gives free rein to behaviors that most of the rest of us find appalling.
It's not surprising that Bluesky is what it is. It was born that way.
