'Incubator for Death Threats': Non-Conforming Journalist Joins

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We’ve written at length here about Bluesky, the social media platform that woke leftists and many of their pals in the media have fled to in recent months, with account creation accelerating rapid-fire in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s Election Day victory over Kamala Harris.

The primary reason for them leaving Twitter/X is that in their view it is intolerable now due to owner Elon Musk’s support for and professional involvement with the President-Elect.

Among the specific reasons they’ve given for fleeing to what they feel are safer spaces is that Musk is not as quick to throttle/ban supposedly offensive and threatening content (read: opinions our intellectual betters don’t like), something they say has only gotten worse since November 5th.

One independent journalist who decided to try things out at Bluesky is Jesse Singal. In Singal’s case, he says he was looking for an alternative not because he was afraid of differing viewpoints but because he didn’t find Twitter/X fun or engaging anymore, and was not a big Elon Musk fan.

Though he has continued to use Twitter/X, Singal, who has previously written about the harms of so-called “gender-affirming” treatments, ventured to Bluesky in early December, only to find that the platform was actually even worse than its critics made it out to be:

As I soon found out, it is an exceptionally angry place. And in part because of a widespread culture of impunity when it comes to violent threats among some of its users, it comes across as a potentially dangerous one—in a way X, or Twitter, never did for me in my decade-plus of actively using that platform. Bluesky has either made a conscious decision to take a laissez-faire attitude toward serious threats of violence, or its moderators are incapable of guarding against them, or both.

… I’ve become a symbol of bigotry and hatred to a group of activists and online trolls as well as advocacy orgs like GLAAD that push misinformation about the purported safety and efficacy of these treatments, and attempt to punish journalists like Abigail Shrier for covering the controversy at all.

Bluesky appears to have attracted a particularly high number of these trolls, and even before I arrived on the platform, some of them were making sure I wouldn’t feel welcome there.

Here are some of his receipts (via this thread):

Last but not least (language warning):

Some of the screenshots he posted were too disgusting and expletive-filled to post here.

One Twitter/X user responded to Singal’s thread by pointing out that “I created an account there and spent maybe half a day looking around. I’ve never seen such deranged hatred in my life.”

That was my experience as well after I created my account (for research purposes), and that’s saying something considering I’ve seen an awful lot of hatred directed my way on social media platforms in the form of death and rape threats over the years.

Relatedly, my colleague Teri Christoph documented how cringe “tech reporter” Taylor Lorenz felt comfortable enough to use Bluesky to post how she felt little to no sympathy for murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson because “people have a very justified hatred toward insurance company CEOs.”

To be fair, on any social media site you’re going to find stupidity, ignorance, crudity, grotesque callousness, violent rhetoric, and threats in between the useful information and conversations that are posted on them.

But when the bad stuff becomes the rule more so than the exception, you’ve got a problem. A big one. And that goes double for left-wing havens like Bluesky, which have been promoted by their defenders as warm, welcoming places that are tolerant of disagreement but which at the end of the day will attack non-conformists like a pack of wolves until there’s nothing left.

This is something to keep in mind whenever you read about anyone among the “Smart Set” who is cutting ties with Twitter/X on grounds they can’t deal anymore with the “hate” they feel Elon Musk promotes. If they really do despise hate, you’d think the last place they’d run to would be Bluesky which, as Singal has indicated, is “an incubator for death threats” and other types of deranged discussions few sane people would enjoy.

But they are there, an inconvenient (for them) fact which confirms all over again that it’s not “hate” they hate, but anyone who dares to counter their bogus narratives and agendas and who won’t be subjected to the throttle/suspend button for doing so.

FLASHBACK: A Word About Theatrical ‘I’m Leaving Twitter’ Announcements