I Was Canceled By Bluesky. And I Still Don’t Know Why.

The safe space must’ve thought I was too dangerous.

“A Bluesky account you control,” read the unexpected message in my inbox the other day from the Bluesky Moderation Team, “has been detected by our systems as being spammy, fake, or inauthentic. … As a result, your account has been taken down. As a reminder, Bluesky requires that users not use Bluesky to do harm to others, including spamming, scamming, phishing or otherwise disrupting the Bluesky experience for other users. If you have any additional questions or wish to appeal this decision, please reply to this email.”

I did, in fact, have additional questions, the first and most basic of which was …

“Why?”

Bluesky, of course, is of late the fast-growing alternative to preeminent Donald Trump ally Elon Musk’s Twitter-turned-X. Lots of people joined Bluesky after last month’s presidential election — journalists, too, increasingly seeing the Musk-led X as a boorish, right-wing echo chamber not as useful or enjoyable as an earlier-era Twitter. I’d started posting on Bluesky this past summer. Unlike some journalists, though, I made a decision to not simultaneously leave X. Professionally, I have an obligation, I feel, to listen to and interact with all stripes and sorts. On X or any other service, I’m also not one to post stuff to chase cheap clicks — not remotely scammy or spammy or fake. If anything, I’m stubbornly, true-to-self flat. Dispositionally, I’m a reporter, not an influencer — less interesting than interested.

So I pressed for specifics from the Bluesky Moderation Team. “In what way,” I wrote, “did I ‘do harm,’ and to whom?”

The best I could figure — really the only thing I could figure — this sudden quashing of my account might have stemmed from something I’d posted some days before. I linked to a piece by my colleague Nancy Scola. The headline: “Democrats Face an Existential Crisis on X.” The subhead: “Conversations with a dozen insiders point to a party that is unsure about whether to leave or engage with the increasingly MAGA platform.” I, for my part, pointed to a quote in the piece from a person identified as a Democratic communications professional: “Leaving X because you don’t like Elon is the kind of purity politics that landed Democrats in this mess to begin with.” I’m not sure I totally agree with that idea, and I offered on the site, on purpose, no additional comment. All I thought was the quote was worth thinking about. Maybe, I believed, it was something the Bluesky clientele might like chewing on.

They chewed on it all right. It was more like a feeding frenzy. At last check, my post elicited more than 2,100 quote-posts and some 3,700 responses, a tally of interactions easily surpassing my number of followers. Almost all of the feedback was angry, and no shortage was directed not toward Nancy’s piece in general or the quote in particular but … me. Trigger warning here for readers with an aversion to gratuitous profanity and faceless aggression, but I was, in the words of Bluesky users, among many, many other things, a “fucking dork,” a “fucking wanker,” a “fucking moron,” a “dumb fuck” and a “bitch.”

It went on this way for days.

“Dear Michael Kruse,” wrote someone who goes by the handle of Concept of a Wizard, “Why don’t you go and fuck yourself in the ass with a running chainsaw? Yes, shove it all the way up your ass while it is running. That is the best thing you could possibly do to make the United States a better place.”

On the one hand, it’s not a big deal, because it’s part of the deal — regrettably commonplace in what passes for internet discourse. And I get far less of this abuse than people who are not white, male and gentile.

On the other hand, this was notable, because with the exception of a couple episodes — and long before Musk took over — I have on Twitter never been on the receiving end of such a sustained assault. Bluesky says it basically and principally exists as an alternative for those for whom X.com had gotten too noxious, and yet the vitriol here was overwhelmingly ad hominem attacks.

“This is definitely a community that we want to welcome and support on the network,” Emily Liu, who works on partnerships and growth at Bluesky, recently said of journalists in an interview with Poynter. “Bluesky’s demographic,” independent journalist Erin Reed told NBC News, “is literally just anybody who can’t stand the sort of toxic environment that Twitter has become.”

If, though, the idea was to create an environment to protect those seeking to flee from toxicity, in the absence of a definition the question arises: The toxin is what exactly? Unpleasant ideas? Ugly reactions? Maybe the toxin is far bigger than Bluesky could possibly address. Social media overall? People writ large? Even the notion of a safe space — as a smart Democrat texted me as this was going on, “safe for whom, and from what?”

I’m guessing by the outsized reaction that someone in the audience felt the idea in my post constituted “harm” and flagged it. But was there any concern on Bluesky’s part for the “harm” represented by the responses to the post? I want to stress: I don’t feel like I suffered any real “harm” — I’m an adult and all of it was too stupid to hurt — but if there was anybody here to whom “harm” was done, well, it seemed like it was me. I posted about my cancellation over on X — “Meanwhile, over on Bluesky …” — for the same reason I post just about anything anywhere. It was interesting. I thought people might like to mull and discuss. I sent an email to Emily Liu and the CEO, Jay Graber. “Can you help me understand the reasoning here?”

No response.

Perhaps the closest anyone has come to actually explaining why Bluesky’s “systems” targeted my account came in the midst of the pile-on from this guy: “Listening to people say the worst shit imaginable while others finger-wagged about ‘agreeing to disagree’ is how we got into this mess. We draw battle lines and fucking enforce them.” Is that the Bluesky experience? We draw battle lines and fucking enforce them?

And this is why I’ve even bothered to chronicle this kerfuffle. I worry as a citizen about these separate and separating silos we’ve engineered — the ongoing and accelerating on-screen manifestation of our warring, dispiriting state of play. We have to be able to understand each other, and listen to each other, and talk to each other — have to — or else. Can Bluesky host and foster a more decent, more nuanced, more wide-ranging brand of conversation? Or will it in time become merely a generally left-of-center version of the very place so many Bluesky users came to consider a nasty, troll-teeming cesspool they could no longer accept or endure?

Silence from Bluesky.

A little more than three hours after I emailed Graber and Liu — and a little less than six hours after I got the first email from the Bluesky Moderation Team — I got a second. “After a thorough review,” read the note, “we have determined that the takedown action applied to your account was incorrect. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Consequently, we are reversing our initial decision and reinstating your account.”

Included was a link to the “community guidelines.” On the list of no-nos: harassment or abuse directed at a specific person, encouraging self-harm, depictions of excessive violence, gore, torture dismemberment, or non-consensual sexual activity. “We rely on the entire community,” it read, “to enforce our community guidelines” — on people like, say, “Concept of a Wizard,” who posted the day after the election he or she or they were “coping” by playing Fallout 3 while “I imagine every creature I kill is a Trump supporter.”

“Thank you,” the Bluesky Moderation Team concluded, “for doing your part to keep Bluesky a welcoming and empowering place for all users.”

I was happy enough to be reinstated. It’s part of my job, after all, for better and for worse, to be on social media, and to stay on. And that means more or less following the rules — over on X, too. Still, though, I had no idea who or what had reported me, and for which violation or violations. Was it a human? Was it a bunch of them? Was it some algorithm? Was it a combination of all of the above? Or was it just an innocent mix-up on account of a staff grappling with the task of scaling up in a post-election push? Did so many somebodies report me for posting a quote that it triggered some sort of mechanical zap? Had I spammed, had I scammed, had I phished? Had I been unkind or unreal? Had I disrupted the Bluesky users’ Bluesky experience?

No matter what, though, transparency is a necessity in any open, good-faith conversation. “What,” I asked the Bluesky Moderation Team, “was the reason?”

Don’t know. Haven’t heard back.