Bluesky response submission

I am writing to complain about your recent changes to your terms of service regarding “consent” in drawn or fictionalized NSFW content on your platform & such changes disregard for the feedback you solicited on refactoring such rules. Clearly this solicitation was not performed in good faith if this is the result. This will not make people safer, but it WILL hurt and terrorize the people on your platform, many of whom now depend on the site for advertising.

Repeatedly I've watched your company step on the very people who built your service into THE place for science communication, independent journalism & the “modern town square” discussion of culture and current events online. That you crush artists and marginalized people while speaking about safeguarding them is an irony I'd find humorous if it wasn't so evil.

Drawings cannot consent. Neither can a drawing lack consent, as it is a work of fiction, not an entity with agency. And demanding that they all come with little “all of the non-entities in this drawing would consent if they were real.” disclaimers, doesn't do anything to make anyone on your platform safer but it does give your company another lever to pull when it comes time to ban another trans or black person off your site just for trying to share and promote legal artwork in ways they legally have the right to do. We already have robust content filters if people do not wish to interact with NSFW content that offends their sensibilities. The fact you know this and are implementing this policy anyway shows your intent is not safeguarding, but censorship.

I'd say shame on you, but your entire company appears incapable of the thing & this entire scheme seems premeditated and pre-planned in it's censorious overreach.

So instead of shame i will appeal to your bottom line.

I am actively seeking to move my social media use off your platform. I will encourage everyone I know to do the same and will stress to them the hostility and lack of personal safety using Bluesky represents. Whether they be PoC, Palestinian, queer or transgender, your company has through it's nakedly transphobic and stunningly poor moderation & decisions that have exposed your user base to doxxing and harassment from professional bad actors, shown itself to be hostile to said marginalized groups utilizing your platform and actively taking steps that compromise peoples real world safety.

I will do this as long as your company maintains its enthusiastic support of bigotry and censorship in our society and the crushing of your own user base via the guise of inept “safety” enhancements.

Please do not follow up with me, there are no words that will resolve this situation. Remedial action involves a course correction by your CEO and decision making bodies, not canned PR statements or the babble of an LLM cosplaying as HR.

With extreme hostility,

A trans woman looking for my coat and heading for the door