As we entered the final month of the year; 2024 really wanted to make sure we don’t forget her by delivering us an assassination, an arrest and an asshole right to our door. But the reaction from some people on Bluesky to these events has me a little bit worried about some of you.
I have genuinely had to take a break from the internet for a couple of days to think about this because I know it isn’t going to win me any friends but it needs to be said. But what in the god damn do you think you’re all doing?
It’s hard to know where to even start but lets crack on with the Jesse Singal stuff. Bluesky was launched in October and has seen many surges of people joining the platform. None larger than when Donald Trump was once again elected as President of the USA with help from his techbro pet, Elon Musk. Twitter was never good but under Musk it has become significantly worse for me and the thousand or so of my followers who deleted their accounts since the election.
We specifically left because the harassment and abuse we faced from users on Twitter was not being dealt with adequately and we didn’t want to continue using a platform that benefits Musk and Trump. My notifications on the site, usually an endless stream of engagement, have completely stood still for days. Before I locked my account the only notifications I was still receiving were from bigots searching up old tweets to harass and abuse me and my friends on.
I joined Bluesky and my first post there to break a thousand likes was about transphobes coming to the platform and how we should follow the practice of block early and often. It resonated because it’s true; we don’t need transphobes, they need us. Transphobes bring absolutely no positives to our lives outside of a few funny dunks here and there, the other 99.9% is them just being horrific towards us in a whole myriad of ways that boil down to having absolutely zero respect for our basic humanity, let alone our gender identites.
So when Jesse Singal not only joined Bluesky but did so specifcally to bring with him the harassment and abuse we had escaped Twitter to get away from; my first and only post was about blocking him and everyone who follows him. My friend and Trans Writes regular, Jess O’Thomson, even went as far as making a whole block list that does exactly that for you at the touch of a button! It could not have been easier.
Instead my entire feed was filled with posts about Singal and his “just asking questions” bigotry for 3 days. He came to Bluesky very specifically to get this kind of attention and was delivered it in spades almost immediately. He spent the first day retweeting people criticising him or not wanting to engage with his bullshit, including Jess, in a pretty clear attempt to see those people jumped on by the following he specifically brought with him for that purpose.
This problem was, admittedly, massively exacerbated by the inconsistent moderation from the Bluesky moderation team. Applying labels to his account then removing them, suspending his account and reinstating it. A good chunk of the posts about Singal were about this moderation issue, so I get it, to some degree. But nonetheless his existence on the platform, labelled or unlabelled, ceases to really be a problem when he and his followers are blocked by everyone and we’re all just pretending he doesn’t exist at all.
He would have gotten bored and gone back to Twitter; I don’t see that being the case now that Bluesky users and staff have given him so much attention.
The Nick Fuentes story and Fuentes as a whole is a lot easier to sum up; he is just saying things to get you mad. Knowing this your only goal should be to not acknowledge his existence in any way. Because that’s exactly what he wants and how he generates his influence and incomes. Yes, I am breaking this rule right now and it absolutely sucks that I have to do this; but you’ll see why shortly.
Fuentes has been arrested after macing someone at his doorstep. I don’t know exactly why she was there but comments I’ve read lead me to believe it was about him having said “your body my choice” in the wake of Trump’s election. Again; he is a troll just saying things to get you mad – the only winning move is not to play. For the most part people had been very good with this with only the left of center mainstream outlets really paying him any mind and everyone else knowing not to bother acknowledging him because again; that’s exactly what he wants.
However after he was arrested I saw far too many Bluesky users cracking jokes about Fuentes being subject to prison rape. I shouldn’t need to explain why prison and/or rape are bad to people who align themselves with the left. This should already be obvious. But for those who didn’t get the memo yet; rape is bad and you absolutely suck if you even jokingly wish it would happen to someone.
And finally the one that got me called a lib by my friends and had Bluesky users with tens of thousands attempt to quote dunk me; United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s assassination. In short my take was that I didn’t like how bloodthirsty my social cirlces were becoming wherein I had seen people actively promoting and encouraging the murder of people on the street by lone gunmen. You know, as long as its the right people of course.
A lot of Bluesky users were very unhappy with my “maybe we shouldn’t gun people down in the street” take. I was accused of “sucking off CEOs” and ignoring the genocide of Palestine, somehow? Amongst a myriad of other things but I’ll tell you what I told them; If you truly believe the best way out of the hells we find people in is to kill then you should put down the keyboard and pick up a gun. An offer none of them seemed to want to take me up on.
One reply to this was someone saying they didn’t want to “throw their life away” by murdering someone which I found quite funny. “Killing is the only way forwards apparently but someone else should do it because I’m comfy!” You can’t write this stuff. But I get it, I’ve personally avoided lesser direction action that could still get me arrested specifically because well… I love my wife and want to spend all of my time with her.
I have no love for Brian Thompson or United Healthcare. From everything I’ve read they are immeasurably evil and I am honestly surprised someone hadn’t taken a shot at the CEO or other members of staff before now. I just don’t think gunning him down in the street is going to change anything for those struggling and suffering in the US’ Healthcare system.
It may feel good to know that he didn’t get away with it. The long healthy life his company worked to deny others was taken from him just as easily, and it feels kind of karmic. But none of it actually makes things better for US citizens. The machine continues chugging on using people for its fuel. People who will continue to suffer and die because it isn’t just one man who makes any of this happen. It’s the system of capitalism as a whole and you’re going to have to gun down tens of thousands more people to even make a dent in the bodywork and a whole lot more to destabilise its operation.
In my view the answer to ending capitalism and the suffering required to make it work isn’t found in killing those helping weigh the scale in its favour. That just leaves a gap for another asshole to climb into. The answer lies in adding weight to the alternatives, to building socialism, and a world where we all work together for the benefit of all people equally.
I do hope to live to see a day where the Brian Thompson’s of this world see justice; I just don’t believe a gun exists that can deliver that. My idea of justice for those like Thompson is the loss of their power and privilege. It’s them having to use their skills and talents to benefit others above themselves. It’s having to devote time to helping the people they have actively enabled the suffering of.
It is so much more karmic-ly satisfying to me at least to imagine Brian Thompson and the rest of United Healthcare spending every week for the rest of their hypothetically long lives on-call providing care for those whose lives they’ve worked to make barely liveable. Being dead almost makes it feel like he got off easy, by comparison.
Another comment on my Brian Thompson take really highlighted my problem with everything in this post. “Fight fire with fire” accompanied by another which specifically said that the right are doing X,Y,Z horrible thing so why shouldn’t we. I’m worried that Bluesky is just going to become left wing Twitter – the place we hang out in where everyone is just saying and doing horrible things but now its got a lefty slant.
I need you all to know that right wing ideologies and beliefs are bad yes, but so are the behaviours of harassment, abuse, death threats, etc and so forth which the right engage in. There is no good or left wing way to behave like the right – the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
There’s a small light at the end of this tunnel in the many Bluesky users who didn’t engage in these behaviours and the others who called it all out as “Twitter brained”. But nonethless I was pretty saddened and disheartened by just how much louder the crap voices were around me. If we truly want to see things get better and improve, especially for the most vulnerable in our societies, then we have to be and do so much better than this.
If you just want to get on social media to shout, be angry and get clout – we are going to lose.