Bluesky Issues Warning to Any Users Celebrating Charlie Kirk Assassination | Hacker News Reader

Bluesky Issues Warning to Any Users Celebrating Charlie Kirk Assassination

newsweek.com

44 pointsSilverElfin85 comments

Right now seemingly all of Bluesky is in a frenzy trying to insinuate that this killer is somehow a Republican or "MAGA." Or a Groyper.

The level of cognitive dissonance when people lock themselves in echo chambers is truly astonishing.

You can literally scroll for hours, thousands of posts of people making the same sorts of outrageous and deflective claims.

https://bsky.app/profile/trending.bsky.app/feed/412019139

I have seen comments on HN posting this narrative as well. It defies comprehension. One of the pieces of evidence used to spin this story is the suspect wearing a Trump costume for Hallowe'en, as a 14-year-old, in 2017 (the year that this costume was popular; the entire point was to protest Trump by treating him as a literal boogeyman).

(But of course, it is only seemingly all of Bluesky; and of course it's very easy on social media to start filtering for this content once you first encounter it.)

People are calling for violence against left wingers at large because of this one lone wolf. I don't blame people who want to disassociate from him.

> People are calling for violence against left wingers at large

I have seen nothing of the sort, and I have access to beyond-the-Overton-window right-wing sources. What they have been doing, instead, is pointing out the Bluesky users that TFA concerns itself with.

Consider turning on showdead and looking at your sibling comment lol

I do have showdead on and have had it on basically since I joined the site and learned of the option.

"cindyllm" is, as far as I can tell, an automatically filtered, AI-powered shitposter.

Why do you think the killer had to have a coherent motive?

I'm inclined to think that a gunman without a coherent motive wouldn't write slogans on the bullets, for one thing.

One of the "slogans" was a reference to the game Helldivers 2. They were memes.

You think that writing messages on the casings is obviously coherent?

I don't think we can conclusively say what his motives were yet, even though it is leaning towards him being leftwing. Everyone assumed the Trump shooter was a leftist, but it turned out he was just an incel loser trying (and failing) to make a name for himself.

While I am not in favor of censorship, I do wonder if this is a responsible statement to issue at a time where things can spiral to something worse.

At the same time, the exact words they used may not cover the problematic comments I saw, which were more coded:

> "Glorifying violence or harm violates Bluesky's Community Guidelines. We review reports and take action on content that celebrates harm against anyone. Violence has no place in healthy public discourse, and we're committed to fostering healthy, open conversations," the social media platform wrote in a post.

I am of two minds of this. I respect Bluesky's right to police their part of the ATProto, while also acknowledging this violates the free speech of its users and is a censorship choke point which should be refactored to defend against. A recent example are the most recent events in Nepal.

Nepal Prime Minister Resigns. Parliament / Ministires set on Fire. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45179679 - September 2025

How would you defend against it? Making an alternative social network? Isn’t that only going to lead to more and more echo chambers of limited reach? Or am I not understanding the approach? I am not sure what ATProto is exactly or how it plays a role in this defense.

Are we decentralized yet? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077291 - August 2025

Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45018773 - August 2025

Introduction to AT Protocol - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44965233 - August 2025

> In the early days of Bluesky, Black users felt they were being pushed off. Blacksky became a platform for Black users to feel heard and seen. To create Blacksky, we wrote our own implementation of AT Protocol (called “rsky” and pronounced “risky”). An underlying premise of Blacksky’s rsky is to not only “seize the means of production,” as well as the distribution, but to also act as a “dual power” structure.

> Blacksky’s rsky guarantees our community a seat at the table, and ensures that we can leave and easily make our own table if we need to. That’s the true promise of decentralized social media. [My note: Most relevant part, the rest included for context]

> Clearly I think that decentralization is great, not only for the problems it prevents, but also the new possibilities it creates. But if everyone’s running their own servers, apps, and moderation teams, how do we do global social media? That’s where our vibrant open source developer community comes in.

> Blacksky runs our own global relay at https://atproto.africa, which we built from scratch. Every day, our relay stores its own copy of the hundreds of gigabytes of data of all known AT Protocol accounts — 36 million and counting. We also developed what we call our “moderation relay,” which lets us know about all of the moderation decisions ever made by all mod teams globally.

Think of Bluesky not as a Twitter equivalent platform, but a funded experiment and incubator for bootstrapping a protocol where multiple platforms can operate independently of each other. You can scale a community to tens of millions of users for under a few hundred dollars per month in tech spend (storage, compute, transfer). This is very accessible imho.

Broadly speaking, I understand that there might be speech out there that I find exceptionally distasteful, but that is the speech in many cases (but not all) I am willing to protect, because you don't know when the capability to censor will be weaponized. This remains in constant tension so long as humans are humans. There is no solution, only constant evolution.

I think there are existing 4chan like social networks where you can post away although no one much may notice. Open protocols like the internet provide a way to say what you want but not a way to force people to listen to it.

I missed the news where the US Gov bought out blue sky??? How else could BlueSky violate someone's free speech?

While there is nuance between the government and a private benefit corp like Bluesky restricting speech, I'm rolling it all together for these purposes. I agree there is legal nuance (de facto vs de jure). As I mentioned, Bluesky is entitled to do so, as it is their platform. So, you take your speech to another platform operated on a distributed protocol. This is no different then creators posting their content to Rumble instead of traditional social platforms, for example (as Charlie Kirk did).

https://corp.rumble.com/our-story/

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/20/what-is-r...

> Founded in 2013 by a Canadian entrepreneur, Chris Pavlovksi, Rumble was designed to be an alternative to YouTube for small content creators. But it quickly began to pride itself on being the opposite of other tech firms.

> According to Rumble’s website, it is “immune to cancel culture” and aims to “restore the internet to its roots by making it free and open once again”. Pavlovksi has described it as “neutral”.

> Rumble is backed by the billionaire and prominent conservative venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who invested in 2021, and the conservative former Fox News presenter Dan Bongino, who has 2.9 million subscribers himself. The platform is valued at more than $2bn (£1.6bn).

("what's good for the goose is good for the gander")

Some users may be too young to remember this, but up until the 2010s, liberals were generally opposed to all censorship by anyone, and wanted the First Amendment to be interpreted liberally to apply beyond just government actions. It wasn't until about 2017 that you started to hear liberals say, "They're a private corporation; they can do what they want," which you would have heard only from conservatives before that.

Now that some corporations appear to be shifting again and can't be trusted to censor only conservatives anymore (most notably Twitter after the Musk purchase) we're seeing the 20th-century expansive interpretation of free speech making a comeback on the left. Feels comfy, like an old pair of slippers.

Seeing Musk buy Twitter and start promoting right wing speech rather than left wing speech was quite the shock to these people. Suddenly the realisation dawned that corporate censorship could be used against those you agreed with, and in favour of your opponents.

(it was also amusingly the time in which the right went quiet on censorship on Twitter, for much the same reason).

Either way, it's become really apparent that most people don't have any consistent political beliefs or values, and only value freedom of speech so much as 'their' team gets to say what they want without consequences and their opponents get bullied and shut down at a moment's notice.

Right. As someone famous might have said once, I ask for mercy when I am powerless, and grant none when I am powerful.

The right went quiet about censorship on X because there just isn't much of it. I remember at the time when people were asked to justify the claim X was censoring the left people could only cite three examples, two of which were mistakes and their profiles were rapidly restored (yet they were still being cited as examples of leftists who were kicked off the platform), and one of which was an Antifa account permabanned for ... inciting violence against the right.

In the Twitter years the right could produce endless lists of right wing people banned from the platform, and we now know there were tons of internal emails and discussions about that exact policy. The fact that nobody could produce similar lists for the left post-Musk indicates that he really has significantly improved the free speech situation there.

I am most certainly old enough to remember that, and it is absolutely correct.

I'm 55 years old. I don't recall anything like that.

I'm in my 40s and I remember it very clearly. I'm not even American, but belief in freedom of speech was the norm both inside and outside of the USA.

If you don't, I would say it's because you've forgotten that the word "liberal" in American political discourse used to actually correspond at least vaguely to what traditional dictionaries, historically recognized classical liberal authors, encyclopedias of political thought, and basic logic and reason all used to agree on. As opposed to what it appears to mean now, which seems to be something approximately like "everything that's closer to what the DNC proposes than what the RNC proposes, at any given moment".

There is no free speech here, bluesky isn't the government, it can refuse your speech like a restaurant can refuse your order

That doesn't work in practice when platforms like BlueSky serve as the defacto public square.

Public square or insane asylum? Everytime I look into these services I have the same aversion as when I open LinkedIn, it reads like bots exchanging with bots sprinkled with a few real people caught in between unaware they're talking to no one and radicalizinf themselves in the process.

BlueSky is in no way a public square. It's private property.

BlueSky is more a shopping mall than a public square: anyone can enter, but security can escort you out if you start causing an uproar.

Marsh v Alabama found that private owners might not have the ability to refuse protected speech on their publicly accessible property, so it's not so simple as just being able to declare they're a private entity and that is that.

"In Marsh v. Alabama (1946), the Supreme Court ruled that a privately owned company town could not prohibit individuals from exercising their First Amendment rights to free speech and religion"

I'm not saying bluesky is the exact same, but it seems pretty damn similar to the private sidewalk that the Gulf Shipbuilding Corporation privately owned.

"Freedom of speech" exists separately as a philosophical concept, not as legal doctrine implemented by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. The latter is something I have always considered a shockingly Americentric view. I have seen people go so far as to say that the First Amendment defines what free speech is — which is kind of like saying that the Second Amendment defines what a gun is.

I wonder about this policy: does it only apply to private violence, or does government violence also fall under this guideline? I'm thinking of any discussion of the Ukraine war, ICE raids, etc.

Governments have a monopoly on violence

That would imply that celebrating violence from those in power is fine, but celebrating violence from those not in power is a bad thing. Which is support for the powerful against the powerless. They probably wouldn't want this explicitly stated though.

That doesn't mean all government use of violence is to be applauded

These proclamations pretty much always apply to limited categories of violence. You're fine celebrating good violence like the US victories in WW2.

There is nothing wrong with policing speech on platforms. If you don't (or do) want specific kinds of speech on the platform you own, it is fully your right to discourage (encourage) users to behavior a certain way.

The repercussions of that are your own. Quite honestly, the repercussions are likely small in the long run if it helps to better establish civil norms and self governance.

you know something is wrong when even Bluesky is too conservative for them

Good for twitter/x, the freedom platform

The freedom the US has to kill anyone anywhere without trial trickles down, and individual citizens believe it is their right to use violence in the same way.

It was inevitable, especially since Israel can reach out and kill whoever it wishes, without consequences.

Seeing the people on social media celebrating Kirk's murder is so saddening and maddening. I am shocked that social media has allowed such widespread celebration of the murder of a US citizen.

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