‘We’re Billionaire Proof’: BlueSky Exec Touts Alternative to Musk’s Right-wing X
Social media provider has been surging since the election
A top executive at BlueSky pulled the curtain back on what is making the upstart social media platform a fast-growing alternative to billionaire Elon Musk’s right-wing X.
BlueSky has been recording a high amount of growth as users flee X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter which owner Musk has transformed into a haven for MAGA supporters and unrestrained right-wing propaganda.
BlueSky, in particular, has been growing its user base since last month’s election in which Musk became a loud and ubiquitous backer of Donald Trump’s.
Bluesky currently has more than 22 million users, up from about 12 million people in mid-October, according to company data.
Rose Wang recently appeared on MSNBC to explain why.
In one respect, it’s because BlueSky isn’t algorithm-dependent the way X is, she said.
“We are used to being trapped in one algorithm that’s controlled by a small group of people and they decide what we see, what type of content gets taken away, who to promote, and decentralization just means a more democratic way where users get to vote with their feed,” Wang said. “So on BlueSky there are about 50,000 different feeds that somewhere been created by other users. So there are feeds that are like either about cats, maybe about five cat feeds, more than 250 Swiftie feeds, and various other feeds that are either organized chronologically or based on what your followers are liking.
“You can even use a politics filter to turn off politics or turn it back on, depending on what your mood is that day. So we’re — you actually get to interact with real people and have fun conversation again in a safe environment.”
At a higher level, it makes a difference that BlueSky's top two executives both are women, Wang said.
“Bluesky is run by two women, me as the [chief operating officer] and Jay Graber as the CEO. One of the biggest differences is we just put safety as a priority. What did that look like? It means last year when we had invite codes we didn’t open it up because we wanted to have a stronger moderation team.”
BlueSky hired Aaron Rodericks, the one-time leader of the Trust and Safety team at Twitter before he was cut loose by Musk.
“We brought over Aaron Rodericks who used leads us here at BlueSky it goes back to user choice. There are so many things between intolerance, hate speech and people having a bad experience that isn’t governed on most social media platforms,” Wang said. “There’s deepfakes, rude posts, speculative information, and so on most other platforms there’s nothing you can do about those types of content.”
Wang also explained how BlueSky technology guards against the kind of right-wing takeover that Musk engineered with Twitter more than two years ago.
“We say that we’re billionaire proof, and oftentimes people are like, ‘Does this mean there are no billionaires involved with BlueSky?’ What we mean by that is you don’t have to trust us,” she said. “We have built BlueSky assuming that the company in the future might be a future adversary.
“What does that mean? It means if someone buys BlueSky or if we’re no longer here, we want to make sure that BlueSky is still open and that means you own your data and you can move to ‘GreenSky’ or ‘YellowSky,’ or something else,” Wang added. “If it changes to something you absolutely hate, you can absolutely go somewhere else. When we say trust us, we mean trust our infrastructure.”
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