Bluesky started its life as an alternative to the ‘enshittifying’ of Twitter: bots, fascism, and AI becoming commonplace, making the site harder, some even saying impossible, to use. So, for the starting point of blocking misinformation, the ‘easy’ part is the fact that the people making Twitter worse stayed there because they were happy, while everyone who was disgusted and annoyed left to head to Bluesky, which meant that most of the people deliberately spreading lies were already out of the way. Of course, simply leaving a toxic space doesn’t inherently make a site misinformation-free. Bad actors can always slip into a space, after all. But there is an inherent cushion coming from its current reputation as A More Left-Wing Space Than Twitter. People trying to pander to the right wing, or grift, naturally gravitate to Twitter more because Bluesky is still a bit smaller and newer, compared to Twitter’s “long”, “industrious” history.
NAFO (a moderately informal organization dedicated to combating misinformation from Russian agents/forces and assisting with the situation in Ukraine) took an opportunity to examine how Bluesky’s smaller nature and user-led moderation efforts can leave it open to weaknesses when it comes to the spreading of misinformation overall. The author of the article does make a point that user-led efforts to ban bots and get rid of misinformation from duplicate accounts are doing a good job, just that the owners of the site could be doing more both themselves and to strengthen the tools said ‘unofficial mods’ can use to do so. But there’s also the fact that the decentralized approach is part of Bluesky’s appeal-the idea that you don’t have to worry about God-King-Tyrant Elon Musk deciding that your account must die, snapping his fingers, and doing so. It’s a tricky tightrope to walk.
There’s another site that I have personal experience with that I want to illustrate, even though it is absolutely not perfect: the site Something Awful. Something Awful is a forum site rather than a more modern social media, and it’s older than Twitter, having existed since 1999. The site has a reputation for trolling and meanness, and it’s not entirely undeserved, but as someone who spent a good chunk of time there, I can say it’s not as bad as it used to be.
But I was still able to get a front-seat witness to one of the most bizarre revelations in an internet space.
One user known as TheDarkId is fairly beloved in Something Awful’s Let’s Play space- an area of the forum where users post themselves playing a video game for other people, sharing their commentary and discussing the events as they happen. Some Let’s Plays are video, some use screenshots and text, with TheDarkId preferring the latter category. TheDarkId was famous for turning his LPs (for short) into goofy acts of pseudo-fanfiction, inserting (clearly delineated) dialogue for comedy, to poke jokes at the plot and gameplay and spice up things. He was heavy on the swears and sarcasm, but it had a charm, and he was even mildly influential, though not to any absurd degree. This pseudo-Mystery Science Theatre 3000 approach to Let’s Playing made him fairly beloved in the community, and his Let’s Plays of the Drakengard series, as well as their sequels Nier and (eventually) Nier: Automata broke those games in certain aspects.
Then it came out that he was dying of cancer. The community was saddened, but he managed to finish his ongoing project, the dark comedy horror JRPG sequel Shadow Hearts: Covenant, before he passed.
Or, I should say, ‘passed’. As it turns out, some people had been doing some digging and found out that he was lying about all of this for clout and sympathy. Members of the community had done some fact-checking and it turns out that over different social medias and his personal Discord, DarkId was a pathological liar who claimed (among other things) to be a badass world-saving mercenary with a hot spy wife, claimed he had a daughter who died of cancer, used multiple sockpuppet accounts to cheer himself on, forged fake ‘cute kid art’ to post in forum threads of his LPs and many, many, many other ludicrous things. Once it came out, the community did a 180 on him, and he became a joke.
This is notable because Something Awful has some absolutely harsh mods, and one of the harder barriers to overcome: You need to pay $10 to gain an account. And they’re extremely good at detecting alts from the same user, so ban evasion through throwing money around isn’t going to help. It just goes to show that a dedicated one-man misinformation campaign can slip through almost any crack in the world, even one as pathetic and self-serving as this one.
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