# Bluesky's trust & saftey isn't inept, it's just libertarian Put the pitchforks away, you freaks. This isn't a libertarian manifesto (though, we do touch on one below). This is just me breaking the news to those who may not be clued-in— Blusky is more libertarian than a house cat in a Portland suburb. It's time we talk about it, and the fact that technology is never apolitical. Like all novel technologies, Bluesky is a paradigm shift that comes with tradeoffs. But, there's also an ideological shift happening, too. It's not a new ideology by any means. Our Internet overlords have been trying to decentralize accountability and centralize profits since the early days of EBay. Ironically, though, it's not the technology part that non-tech folks aren't grasping. For the most part, people get that Bluesky is “decentralized”, even if they don't understand what that means on a technical level. No, it's the idea that technology is, and always has been, political, and those political ideologies can manifest itself from ones and zeros. We all understand this on some level, but I think we're used to scanning speech for trigger words that tip us off to the political ideology of any particular message. Techno-libertarianism is very careful not to tip people off to its identity. Rhetoric is very matter-of-fact and apolitical sounding. Bluesky was born from a techno-libertarian manifesto written by Bluesky board member Mike Masnick, called "Protocols," Not Platforms." Masnick published the manifesto in partnership with the Knight First Amendment Institute in 2019, at the height of the public's awareness of just how fucked up social media has become. But there's a disconnect. The general public's diagnosis of the social media crisis, and what problems techno libertarians were willing solve, are in sharp contrast with one another. And that's fine. People, institutions, corporations, and think-tanks, are free to solve whatever problems they wish. The issue here is, somewhere along the line, decentralized social media became a Potemkin revolution for the masses migrating from the “bad places.” We all kind of assumed that since X was unsafe and data-mined, that Bluesky would be the opposite of that. But saftey and privacy are not in the company's core values. Bluesky the app, and the AT Protocol are libertarian pursuits, with libertarian ideologies baked into its core. That necessarily means trust, safety, and privacy take a back seat to issues like free speech. They may say we can have it all, but we know that's never how that works. Take moderation, for example— It's not that Bluesky isn't doing *anything* to protect its members from hate speech. The Bluesky team has, overall, done a good job scaling it's infrastructure to accommodate the influx of new members. They're quadrupling their moderation team from 25 to 100 sub-contract workers. That's a *good* thing. But the Bluesky team has been quasi-upfront with its goals. It's to always do *less*; to "empower" its members to make their own moderation decisions using front-facing moderation tools. The problem with this approach, of course, is just because you don't see hate speech, it doesn't mean it isn't sewing hate. Libertarians have terrible object permanence. They believe covering your eyes makes the the thing in front of you disappear. But with issues like hate speech, it's not always what reaches your eyes and ears, it's what reaches others and becomes normalized. Being called a slur sucks, sure. But convincing thousands of people that, say, trans people shouldn't exist, is far more destructive. Libertarians attempt to solve this issue by asking the free market if trans people should exist. Whereas perhaps a more left-leaning approach might acknowledge that free speech is a right we preserve through governance, not private entities. We should not allow Nazis into the bar lest it becomes a Nazi bar. Now, folks like Masnick might point to bleeding edge cases as a retort. *Who gets to decide who is and isn't a Nazi?* and *Should CEOs with billions of users be able to censor voices?* Those are good points but of course, the conditions that lead to a social media company amassing billions of users is brought on by the type of unfettered free market capitalism that libertarians advocate for. It's at least a little ironic that Mike Masnic has a highly influential essay and two board games expressly made to show how impossible it is to manage a billion-user social media platform, yet it seems that it hasn't occurred to him that such a platform simply shouldn't exist. Or, at the very least, we should respect our anti-trust regulation we have in place so that one company doesn't hold a monopoly on speech. But to a techno-libertarian, the only way to preserve free speech is to actively build tools that make it easier for Nazis to spread their ideology. And to be clear, such a platform will arise eventually. The worst person you can think of will build a hate speech platform using AT Protocol. And then there's privacy. If there's one question open web evangelists don't have a great answer for, and has rather successfully been able to avoid answering, it's *why is all of our data so very public?* I don't mean public as in restroom. That would at least imply some type of locking mechanism, even if the door doesn't go all the way down to the floor. I mean public as in, you find yourself with a full bladder at three in the morning on Bourbon Street and you parked a half mile away. Email has long been the analogy we use to describe how decentralized social media works. If that's accurate, someone please point me to the open email firehose index. I want to see who's talking shit about me on Outlook. I kid. Decentralized social media like Bluesky claim to be revolutionaries ready to topple tech oligarchs and give the power back to the people. I'm a skeptic, to say the least, but for argument's sake, let's give them the benefit of the doubt. If decentralizing the protocol and platform layers disperses power, then what does an open firehose index of all of our user data accomplish? Because if I remember correctly, the most existential threat to Internet citizens to arise in the last decade was a little scandal called Cambridge Analytica. And since then, big tech nor our government has done anything about it. Instead, we've seen a framing of the issue away from privacy and towards “free speech.” After Cambridge Analytica, we all learned the hard way that our digital footprints can be weaponized against us. Cambridge Analytica was born, in part, from a study published in 2015 called “[Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418680112).” From the PNAS study: > Using several criteria, we show that computers’ judgments of people’s personalities based on their digital footprints are more accurate and valid than judgments made by their close others or acquaintances (friends, family, spouse, colleagues, etc.). Our findings highlight that people’s personalities can be predicted automatically and without involving human social-cognitive skills. So, our comments, likes, and shares that we accumulate on social media are like little oracles that predict our state-of-mind and sometimes, how we may react to specific situations. Yet, since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in 2018, we have only taken massive steps backwards in pursuit of protecting our digital footprints. Thought leaders in the tech community have successfully framed this issue away from privacy protection, and towards a free speech crusade. Mike Masnick's essay Protocols, Not Platforms has been elevated to a sort of Federalist Papers for the decentralized movement, and is where Bluesky draws much of its infrastructure inspiration. In it, Masnick touches on the dangers of centralized power amassed in the tech world, but frames the solution as a matter of protecting free speech. The essay has little to say about privacy protection, or even the massive privacy scandal that occurred just one year prior to its publication. If you can't beat’em, give them unfettered access to our data, I always say. The Bluesky team has gone through considerable efforts to distance themselves from their original visionary, Jack Dorsey. To her credit, CEO Jay Graber bested Dorsey so bad that it's actually hilarious. There's an argument to be made that since then, Graber has been slowly moving away from Dorsey's libertarian utopia where he invisions himself as a sort of feudalist Lord, shielded from congressional inquiry. But there's still one glaring Dorsey-relic baked deep into the Bluesky infrastructure— the active pursuit of destroying the expectation of privacy. In the US, our government cares so little about the peoples' privacy and data that even our most populous congresspeople have joined Bluesky without so much as a raised eyebrow. I respect AOC, but it's been jarring to watch her pledge her allegiance to the new microblogging app so quickly. The fact that a firehose index of all our data is open and available to anyone who wishes to fill their buckets, is a testament to the lack of privacy protections in the US. In fact, the only time social media companies and their tech bro leaders ever get in trouble with our government, is when they fail to live up to the expectations of privacy they themselves set. When Twitter and Jack Dorsey got in trouble with the FTC due to flimsy privacy settings that allowed Google to index Tweets, no laws were broken. Again, it was Jack Dorsey who set an expectation of privacy the company did not meet. When Cambridge Analytica created psychological profiles on millions of Americans using Facebook's Social Graph API, no laws were broken. Because Mark Zuckerberg set the expectation of privacy, and what Cambridge Analytica was accused of doing was so novel, the scandal caused outrage. Congress has no choice but to invite Zuck for a televised meeting. What's funny though, is during the entire congressional hearing following Cambridge Analytica, not a single Congressperson ever uttered the words "Social Graph" or even alluded to Facebook's API that allowed the psychological manipulation of millions of users. So what we have here is a situation where all the benefits of decentralization, like the toppling of centralized power structures, are yet to be realized. We are mostly just trusting companies like Bluesky to follow through on their promises. What we're seeing with Bluesky, in the absence of any meaningful data protection laws, is the dismantling of privacy expectations. Because if there's no longer an expectation, then there's nothing to get in trouble for.