Bluesky Has a Jesse Singal Problem

They were warned about him. They ignored those warnings. Now they've lost the support of the people who made their site what it is.

by Josh Colletta

Yeah, I know, the title is the least original thing I could have gone with, but fuck it; he’s not worth any more effort than this.  If you’re not up on the details, I’ll keep it as brief as possible.

Jesse Singal is a hack “writer” (and I use the term loosely) who uses the “just asking questions” and “polite fascism” approaches to couch his positions in a way that the center-left (liberals), moderates, and the center-right (neocons) are accepting of.  He has several credits to his name in outlets like the New York Times, The Atlantic, and New York Magazine.

Singal has ties to the terrorist web forum Kiwi Farms, which exclusively exists (barely) to harrass, attack, SWAT and threaten women, and especially transgender women.  When Singal was seemingly having technical issues with Bluesky earlier this month, he specifically called upon Kiwi Farms users for help.  What he was actually doing — which he had earlier stated was his goal — was asking them to help him “colonize” (his own word) Bluesky.  Apparently he forgot one of the first rules of Internet forum membership: this is not your personal army.

Singal has also repeatedly and consistently advocated for supporting non-offending “gold star” pedophiles, including an episode of the podcast he co-hosts with Katie Herzog (a real piece of work in and of herself) in which they elevated the “work” of quack sexologist James Cantor.  Cantor advocates for integrating pedophilia into the gender and sexual minority umbrella as a way to discredit, undermine, and attack the LGBTQIA+ community; and has partnered with the theocratic Nazi legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom to achieve that goal.

In that same podcast episode, Singal and Herzog speak in defense of a pro-pedophilia organization called Prostasia (I don’t even want to link to anything involving them), which is a really, truly fucked-up group who connect underage kids with adults who claim to be these “gold star pedophiles” under the guise of providing a “safe” and “sex-positive” environment for them to interact in.  I wish I were making that up, but I’m not.

As off-base as RationalWiki can be at times, they have a pretty good write-up about Singal here.  I didn’t rely on it to write my own description, I’m just passing along what I’ve seen play out, myself; but if you read that article, you’ll see it pretty much matches up.  Jesse Singal is a massive piece of shit who wraps himself in the language of “respectability” (and you well know that I hate respectability politics; this is but just one reason why) in order to promote a sick, disgusting, hateful, and abusive agenda — and engage in that abuse, himself, particularly toward trans women, who he has doxed, harassed, directed his followers to attack, and just generally been an asshole toward.

So the basic gist of this whole thing with Bluesky is that Singal decided to come over from Twitter to start shit, as he does on every platform he joins, against the transgender women on the site.  Trans women, alongside sex workers, Black folks, and other minorities, made up the bulk of Bluesky’s earliest adopters.  They have crafted the culture of the platform as it exists today.  They are still among the site’s most active users.  Singal explicitly joined Bluesky to change that by harassing them into leaving, because like all transphobic Nazis, he is compulsively obsessed with eliminating trans people from all public spaces.

The automatic moderation system almost immediately flagged his account based on reports from people who he had harassed, but the ownership and moderation group — namely Aaron Rodericks, Bluesky’s head of “Trust & Safety” — almost as quickly removed those flags as soon as Singal started complaining.  Singal also shared someone’s private healthcare information without consent, and faced no consequences whatsoever.  It’s even alleged that Singal had his lawyer demand the personal information of a user he was particularly targeting, and Bluesky’s leadership allegedly rolled over immediately and sent that information. 

As the complaints from nearly the entire remainder of the site’s active user population grew louder, Singal ramped up his attacks, and the silence from Bluesky’s officials was deafening.  A change.org petition was launched to demand that the rules of the site be enforced against Singal, and it gained more than 20,000 signatures (my own included) in less than 48 hours.  After days and days of outcry, Rodericks, through the site’s Trust & Safety account, put out a long-winded missive that basically boils down to “we’re not going to do anything against Singal, so quit’cher bitching about it.”

The response from the community was basically “okay, so anything goes now.  Understood.”

People began to share Singal’s publicly available address in Brooklyn.  Rodericks tried to shut that down by banning the text string, but was quickly overruled by everyone sharing it in images instead — some even including maps.  People began to post comments vaguely suggesting violence in regard to Singal with just enough plausible deniability to avoid legal ramifications.  People began suggesting that maybe all that talk in defense of pedophiles might be a reason to scan all of Singal’s devices to see if anything of particular interest to the authorities might come up.  You get the idea.

Basically, Jesse Singal was bullied away from Bluesky (though he’s still actively harassing people on the site) in a less violent manner than he’s used to bullying others with. He deleted most of his posts, tucked his tail between his legs, ran back to Twitter, and wrote a whiny, half-assed, bullshit piece called “Bluesky Has a Death Threat Problem” for Bari Weiss’s fake news outlet The Free Press.

Which, for the record, is not to be confused with The Detroit Free Press, who really should sue Weiss for her violation of their trademark, as anyone who lives in Michigan knows that the legitimate newspaper is commonly referred to as “the Free Press,” dropping “Detroit” from the name.  But I digress.

I didn’t even really want to write about this.  Enough has been said about it already.  But being a social media user who is sick and tired of the Nazis “colonizing” any site where the established base opposes them and watching the ownership and leadership behind platform (Facebook) after platform (Twitter) after platform (Threads) cave in to the “colonizers” demands, this is the first time I’ve ever seen the existing base actually fight back with any success, and that’s notable.

But more importantly, it’s both a warning and a rallying cry. Bluesky’s leadership is still wrong. Bluesky’s leadership has not changed their approach for the better — in fact, they literally changed it for the worse. This is not over.  Singal is still on the site and is still actively harassing people.  And it does not end with Jesse Singal or any of his “colonizers.” The users of the site are still at risk from a company simply refusing to enforce the rules that the company set themselves and giving up whatever is demanded of them by a cheap lawyer who knows how to put the logo they bought on Fiverr in an e-mail signature.

In short, Bluesky Social is an unserious company being run by unserious people.

Now, as you can see in the screen shot below (just enter the entity name and file number here), the company is incorporated in Delaware as Bluesky Social, PBC; registered by a third party company that exists specifically to do that for out-of-state organizations who wish to take advantage of Delaware’s favorable corporate laws.  Bluesky Social, PBC is actually headquartered in Seattle, and Washington has its own public benefit corporation law, but if you know anything about the business world, you know that companies love to incorporate in Delaware because of their favorable business regulations, taxes, and legal system.

Entity Details

THIS IS NOT A STATEMENT OF GOOD STANDING

File Number: 6282898

Incorporation Date / Formation Date: 10/4/2021 (mm/dd/yyyy)

Entity Name: BLUESKY SOCIAL, PBC

Entity Kind: Corporation

Entity Type: Benefit Corporation

Residency: Domestic

State: DELAWARE

REGISTERED AGENT INFORMATION

Name: THE CORPORATION TRUST COMPANY

Address: CORPORATION TRUST CENTER 1209 ORANGE ST

City: WILMINGTON

County: New Castle

State: DE

Postal Code: 19801

Phone: 302-658-7581

Delaware’s public benefit corporation law defines such a company thusly:

§ 362. Public benefit corporation defined; contents of certificate of incorporation.

(a) A “public benefit corporation” is a for-profit corporation organized under and subject to the requirements of this chapter that is intended to produce a public benefit or public benefits and to operate in a responsible and sustainable manner. To that end, a public benefit corporation shall be managed in a manner that balances the stockholders’ pecuniary interests, the best interests of those materially affected by the corporation’s conduct, and the public benefit or public benefits identified in its certificate of incorporation.

“The best interests of those materially affected by the corporation’s conduct.”  In Bluesky’s case, that is its users.  Furthermore:

(b) “Public benefit” means a positive effect (or reduction of negative effects) on 1 or more categories of persons, entities, communities or interests (other than stockholders in their capacities as stockholders) including, but not limited to, effects of an artistic, charitable, cultural, economic, educational, environmental, literary, medical, religious, scientific or technological nature.

Allowing a known abusive user to engage in abuse against other users is most certainly not a “reduction of negative effects” on any number of “categories of persons, entities, communities, or interests (other than stockholders in their capacities as stockholders) including, but not limited to, effects of an artistic, charitable, cultural, economic, educational, environmental, literary, medical, religious, scientific or technological nature.”  Even if you were to include “political” in that list, as Jesse Singal would most assuredly claim as a class he’s protected under, Bluesky Social, PBC would still not be legally required to allow him to engage in the abusive behavior he has engaged in.

And this bending over backwards to allow Singal’s abusive behavior most certainly does not uphold “the best interests of those materially affected by the corporation’s conduct.”

It is exactly and legally correct to state that Bluesky Social, PBC is currently in violation of their certificate of incorporation. They are not only putting their users at risk, they are putting their shareholders at risk by putting the company in a position to get their asses handed to them in a class action lawsuit.  People have literally been harmed.  Some users have had to take steps to protect themselves, up to and including contacting law enforcement — who are just as disinclined to do anything about it, as Singal himself quickly discovered when he tried to report someone for making “death threats” against him.  At least one person’s private health information has been disseminated without their consent.  At least one person’s private contact information has, allegedly, been handed over with no pushback from Bluesky whatsoever.

This all completely contradicts the company’s stated purpose of promoting the AT Protocol as a communications tool for the public good.

I, for one, will not be leaving the Bluesky platform, and I’m not alone.  There are many of us who have made the commitment to stay and fight for what’s already been built there.  That includes using these same tactics against anyone who decides to be transphobic, and especially those who are abusive toward the innocent.  That includes continuing to demand that Bluesky uphold their own original rules against such people — and reverse the changes to those rules that took place in this situation.

Besides, where else are we going to go?  No other public platform is any better.  They’re all just as bad.  Bluesky was supposed to be the alternative, and now it’s turned out to be the same old same old.  So why bother leaving?  Especially when that was Singal’s entire purpose for being there in the first place.  Fuck him and his enablers.  They can all go play in traffic.  We’re not going anywhere any time soon.

But the moment that someone starts a viable, public-facing alternative that actually takes the trust and safety of its users seriously, Bluesky will go the way of Twitter and Threads.  Those two platforms’ rapid decline — which Bluesky undeniably saw the most benefit from — is proof positive that, yes, social media sites large and small can and will collapse.  And in Bluesky’s case, they only have their refusal to uphold the rules against Jesse Singal to blame for that.

That moment will come.

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