As many news vehicles are starting to report, Bluesky has gained a lot of popularity recently and people are still figuring out what this will lead to. But I don’t want to make a bigger analysis here. Instead, I wanna point to a case which made me think about how users behave, and how unpredictable networks can be: the story circulated that an American lady supported the Madison Square Garden comments in the Trump rally insulting the entire Puerto Rican identity, and she claimed they were not Americans. X’s community notes corrected her, repeatedly, until she called for Musk’s personal help because she was felt like she was being trolled.

Long story short, nobody fucking cares who this idiot was, but the people writing on community notes were citing sources and correcting the statement until exhaustion of the topic, and she wouldn’t change her mind. The entire exchange was posted on Bluesky by Mike Masnick, 49 years old, founder of Techdirt, who advised the site’s board, according to him. He also apparently wrote about a hotel domain being taken by pictures of urinals, so let’s just say the man doesn’t always find relevant content to post. But the exchange reveals something I think people should be aware of.

Every now and then, people are challenged directly with divergent opinions. There are notable comment readers. Few use search to find posts and follow people. The algorithm is never gonna be on your side, forget about it, you’ll be jobless and praying that Xi Jinping has mercy on your soul in just a few years. But confrontation makes interesting interaction for the bullies, and a nightmare for ordinary people, not to mention the marginalized and disabled. How to counter attacks on your personhood based on an opinion written down on one of those comments is a task better left unattended. But it’s hard not to fall into that loophole.

The case illustrates something particular because X is a realm of free bullying, and that’s exactly what happened. But technically, they just used the same strategy. A user was saying something incorrect, and X’s loyal users came to the internet’s rescue to fact check. They weren’t interested in revealing the truth, or protecting the Puerto Ricans — they don’t give a shit about them. They wanted to troll the girl. And so they did, through a mechanism that was supposed to make the place safer.

I don’t side with this chick, I know that she was being terribly xenophobic. But that’s not the X userbase’s problem. They’re gathering for America First. But they also hate women, unless they can force a baby into them, and they wanted to make her look pathetic. One user apparently wrote “thanks for speaking out about your public humiliation kink” or something like that. The platform did nothing, and she went viral.

I have two observations: X is hell. Number two: when someone you hate tries to protect your point of view, beware. They’re up to something nasty. Never trust a person who’s made their whole lives a pamphlet for authoritarianism and are now wanting you to express yourself freely. It’s a trap. I could tell you examples, but I don’t think I need to. I’m Ivo, I don’t even have to say my last name, and you know who I am. An additional one would be that, sometimes, people who are on our side say bad things about us. And we should learn how to deal with that, because if it’s not for a good cause, we should be able to tell them to fuck off, politely or not.

The internet I see is an internet where people participate in discussions but don’t feel the need to aggrieve others. We will, however, find people who aggrieve us. Even within the bubble. And it’s a constant movement of expansion. Maybe it’s all Stockholm Syndrome. I should ask a Swedish friend. If the European ladies weren’t all fucking trolls who think that Brazil is the land of monkeys and America didn’t make jokes about Biden disappearing into the Amazon and laughing out loud (because of all places, the Amazon? Damn, Biden), we’d be a little more confident about ourselves. But the hard pill to swallow is that this happened while Musk was campaigning actively for Trump, and he made him win, plain and simple.

I’m not going to comment on Elon Musk having a government position. That should be illegal. Nobody should have that much power. Not Trump, the felon and prominent piece of shit, not Musk, not Bezos, not Pichai, not Ek, not Nadella, not anyone. But if you buy a fight against big tech, you’re gonna lose, sweetie. They already have everything on us. And they might even know in real time when we feel pain, and they don’t make us feel better: instead, they make us reach out to a new notification for a spam account. We’re totally fucked, and no, community notes isn’t gonna save anybody.

As a curiosity, something similar happened to me. I posted a humorous reply to a journalist, mimicking the Brazilian right wing nut; what followed was a self-proclaimed leftist associating me to the Bolsonaro family. If that’s the Left, who can’t interpret text and catch on a reference, then honestly, fuck the Left. I wanna make money. I deserve it. Everybody knows it. And working for big tech, which they’ll refuse to say is work, is gonna have to be something we debate as a society immediately, if we wanna stop Trump and Musk. That’s my analysis.