Bluesky civil war shows free speech (censorship) is harder than it looks
Last week, a joke familiar from X circulated on rival platform Bluesky: “(bluesky user bursts into Waffle House) OH SO YOU HATE PANCAKES??” It was obviously a jab at the moral intensity that now seems to define the site, and indeed much of the rest of the social media landscape. On most platforms such a joke might go viral for a day then fade. On Bluesky, it metastasised into something resembling a crisis.
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber reposted the joke with a comment: “Too real. We’re going to try to fix this. Social media doesn’t have to be this way.” When a user shot back by calling for gender-critical journalist and researcher Jesse Singal to be banned from the platform, Graber responded playfully: “WAFFLES.” The word immediately became a meme, invoked as shorthand for everything that feels absurd about Bluesky’s internal politics, and revealed a divide over free speech and censorship that is roiling the platform.
“Harassing the mods into banning someone has never worked,” Graber argued. “And harassing people in general has never changed their mind.” On a different platform, this might have been received positively, yet almost since its inception as an independent company in 2021 (having previously been affiliated with Twitter) Bluesky has provided a more hostile environment for defences of free speech. The site’s early adopters imagined it as a sanctuary for Left-leaning netizens, especially trans users who fled X after Elon Musk’s takeover in 2022.
