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I deleted my account on BlueSky since last Sept. BlueSky is pretty trash
BlueSky - Because maybe we can go back to the way things were?
Does Mastodon even have the verification feature?
Yes, though it works a bit differently.
In your mastodon bio you link to your other precenses on the web (webpage, twitter, GitHub, whatever)
On those profiles you add an (invisible) link to your mastodon profile. Mastodon can then verify that your mastodon profile and your other sites are controlled by the same entity, and get a blue tick.
What’s stopping ICE from verifying on Mastodon?
The will to do so.
Also finding an instance to register on that won’t ban them for
No incitement of violence or promotion of violent ideologies
(Rule 3 on mastodon.social)
Then what is the point of what the OP is saying? How is Mastodon any different? If anything it looks like it’s worse because ICE just have a basic link to their website and it’s done.
Verified just means we can believe that they are who they say they are. Doesn’t mean that they’re trustworthy or believable. Or to put it another way: The identity of their account is verified. The contents of their posts are not verified.
I don’t agree with the point OP is trying to make in this instance regarding verification. (Letting that well documented lethally violent gang of thugs use their platform is Bluesky’s actual transgression here)
Exactly. Hate bluesky for letting them post the inevitable insane shit they’re going to post, not for verifying they’re who they say they are.
You can verify yourself on Mastodon by including a piece of HTML code in your site’s header.
Literally everyone can do that, even government agencies. I have it on my blog. What do we do then?
If ICE where to join a fediverse instance they would most likely get insta-banned or their instanced would be defederated from large portions of the fediverse very quick.
TBF users on bluesky are pretty quick to block out the Nazis also. They don’t tend to get much traction at least for now.
So, trying to parse what’s going on here.
Bluesky has verified that an account claiming to belong to the US government agency ICE really is controlled by that agency. Somehow that shows that Mastodon is better. Because Trump has his own Mastodon instance and doesn’t need anyone to vouch for his goons?
Looking at the comments, maybe the issue is rather that the Bluesky company provides services to ICE. Tech companies should refuse service. Huh. I guess there is more diversity of opinion on Lemmy than I had thought, regarding the power of tech companies, democracy, and law.
it’s called guilt by assocation. it’s shitty and lame type of logical fallacy
if you live on the same street as a nazi, you must be a nazi. because apparently you have to sell your home and move away if a nazi moves in.
of course, if you do this and it’s a non-white person you are racist… and a bad person, but if you do it for a nazi you’re a good person.
it’s not as if the logic of the thing is what at’s fault, and the accuser has hyperbolic sense of other people’s social obligations to appeal to their sensibility.
I’m not sure where to start here, so here are two equally important building blocks.
First, aside from other reasons the Nazi/minority is wrong, you are comparing a label somebody gets for existing the way they were born with a label somebody gets for actions they take that harm other people.
Second, some kind of mishmash of the terms “social contract” and “paradox of tolerance.”
I would like an explanation as to exactly why a Nazi and a non-white person are comparable categories of people.
Bluesky is a centralized platform and their mods don’t ban Nazis.
Trump being able to clone Mastodon is not the same as letting Trump on Mastodon.social
Every Mastodon instance can choose to defederate with truth social
BlueSky can choose to kick ICE off their platform
It’s that simple
Trump being able to clone Mastodon is not the same as letting Trump on Mastodon.social
The Mastodon devs made a choice in releasing it as open source. They could have decided to pick and chose who is allowed to use it. It was completely foreseeable, that the software would be used for something like Gab or Truth.Social. When they release update, they know that these will also be used by such services.
This is merely a statement of fact, not criticism. They chose not to exercise power or become arbiters of good and evil. That is laudable.
Bluesky is a centralized platform and their mods don’t ban Nazis.
I get it. You feel that tech companies should deny service to bad people. For example, to a government agency acting on behalf of a president elected by a solid majority of the popular vote.
I agree that the voters got it wrong, but I don’t think that the rich and powerful vetoing voters will lead to good outcomes. Look at medieval Europe. Life got better with democracy, not with a supposedly more just king.
The tech lord most in line with your ideas is Elon Musk, except that he’s kinda nazi. So, on a purely practical note, it doesn’t seem very likely that tech companies being more political would lessen racism.
Do you think it would be better if all the billionaires, who are probably mostly non-nazi, were activist like him?
solid majority of the popular vote
narrow plurality
Even then it’s highly dubious that it was even a plurality. Vote counts in swing states were HIGHLY irregular and 100% controlled by Musk.
It’s worth pointing out that “lesser of two evils” reasoning is used by both parties. White privileged “libertarians” voted fascist because they felt unrepresented too.
Every single elected official who isn’t explicitly against FPTP was OK with this outcome. They know about the spoiler effect.
I think that tech companies taking a stand on what their employees and/or users believe in is a reasonable thing.
Idk what the employees of bluesky believe, but I’m fairly familiar with the bay area tech scene and I think that there is a decent chance that the employees would like to take a stand by not providing services to ICE.
That being said, idk if simply allowing them to have an account is providing services. I think it’s probably better to have govt agencies have verified accounts so people know when things are official statements, even if you disagree with the agency.
taking a stand on what their employees and/or users believe in is a reasonable thing.
The majority of USA citizens voted for Trump. Why should Bluesky take a stand on what a minority believe in?
Even if that was true, which it isn’t, a company should reflect the beliefs of its employees and community.
Actually, less than a quarter of citizens voted for him. Less than a 3rd or registered voters.
Not even half of a half of citizens said they wanted this.
I think that tech companies taking a stand on what their employees and/or users believe in is a reasonable thing.
How would that actually work? Like, you’d have pro-Trump and anti-Trump companies that only employ pro- and anti-Trump employees and only serve pro- and anti-Trump customers? What happens when someone who is basically pro-Trump thinks that ICE goes too far?
It’s illegal to hire people or refuse to hire people based on political beliefs or affiliation, so you’re not gonna have companies that only employ Trump supporters or employ no Trump supporters. Politics is considered a protected group wrt employment law in the USA and many countries.
But how would it actually work?
It’s not like it’s difficult to gauge employee sentiment about ICE. If your employees are strongly against it, then you simply don’t enter the competition for ICE contracts, or you choose to not renew the contracts when they expire.
It’s just all emotion and no rational thought now. People just go into outrage mode when certain topics are mentioned.
Really it opens a channel to criticize ICE without needing to logon to X to do so. But that’s bad because preventing communication is good?
Of course I doubt ICE will care about criticism directed towards their account on bluesky. But that means things said on the internet don’t have much of an effect on things, which means it doesn’t matter whether they’re on bluesky (or any other forum).
Mostly it’s about some weird belief by some about controlling what is being said on the internet gains power. You’d think the events that have happened would have proven this wrong, but still people continue to be upset about things being said on the internet and want some power over those things.
Really words on the internet don’t matter as much as people think, and the idea of blocking unwanted information is annoying at best and can lead to ignorance. What matters is the horrible acts ICE is doing. We should want more light being shown on them, and welcome any potential channel of discussion.
Wanting to prevent discussion indicates you feel you’re in the wrong. ICE is indicating they want discussion, while those that are outraged by ICE being on bluesky are indicating they don’t want discussion on ICE. Why would anyone want to make is seem ICE is in the right while they’re in the wrong? It’s people not thinking and only reacting emotionally and handing ICE a W because they are raging instead of thinking.
To me, this feels like school politics.
OMG! Jaden invited ICE to his birthday party! I’m never talking to him again!
Oh No! ICE nabbed Julio! I’m telling the teacher and they will get suspended!
Probably a good number of these people are actual children. I know there are adults who have broadly similar ideas. For someone living a very sheltered and privileged life, being trolled on the internet is the absolute worst form of aggression they ever experience. Particularly in Europe, activists and politicians talk about “digital violence”, which tells you that they have no sense of proportion.
Yep. Better to have these assholes than not.
Also verification isn’t complicated. Anyone can do it.
Yeah, the reactive group signaling stuff does more harm than good, just further perpetuating the conditions that allow propaganda to proliferate. This includes intentionally using the wrong words, for dramatic effect. Wholly agree that more, rational conversation and LESS insularity is the best path forward.
Same logic as, “she smiled at me while taking my order she must be into me”
Block them if you want. Block lists are public so… use caution.
There are MANY government accounts on Blusky. I think if they did not verify them, the government would find someone to buy them or shut them down. Use your heads here.
I prefer the instance blocking Nazis instead of users manually having to do so.
So you’re not using your head then.
You think Nazis should not be banned by admins on your instance?
What’s the alternative? They have admins ban any and all accounts that might be made by ice or ice personnel? Refusing to validate them doesn’t take them off the platform. They’d still be there, you just wouldn’t know who they were. In fact you still don’t, they could very well have puppet accounts all across blue sky, Lemmy, and all of your favorite instances.
At the very least when this account starts to post insane shit, you’ll know it’s actually them and not some edge lord cosplayer pretending to be ice. A verified account removes the plausible deniability aspect of anonymous posting.
And I’m not being argumentative, I’m asking a genuine question. This is the Gestapo wearing a uniform. If anything, they’re stupid for asking for verification. This is them wearing ICE jackets to the grocery store.
The real test will be how bluesky treats the content this verified account posts. When (and let’s be real, it’ll be when, not if) bluesky refuses to censor this account, then they’ll have proven themselves complicit.
They have admins ban any and all accounts that might be made by ice or ice personnel?
yes.
ok, but how do they know which accounts those are?
Isn’t the whole point of the verification checkmark is to make sure nobody impersonate well known people/organizations? I know Twitter eventually turned it into a whole cash grab subscription and ruined the concept, but on most other platforms it isn’t treated like some premium subscription and is just a means of knowing who is who.
Not a new debate at all… https://xkcd.com/1914/ and the context for that was https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/twitter-suspends-verifying-accounts-giving-154625015.html
I agree that if “verification” is going to be a thing, it should only mean the person or organization is who they claim to be, not imply endorsement of any of their activities.
I don’t think anyone impersonating gestapo would post anything worse than they already do, so there’s no damage there
You haven’t been on the Internet very long, huh?
What ICE is doing is way worse than what happens on the internet…? Most of the stuff on the internet is words, ICE is actually kidnapping, killing and deporting people.
Bluesky has a great self-verification system, no checkmark involved. In case someone hasn’t noticed, your username is a domain name, but only nerds use it.
why is this such an issue?? it just shows everyone who to clown on more?
As they should. You only get a ban after you break their rules.
Posting propaganda for a terrorist organization engaged in widespread public abuse is against their rules, do they allow official verified pages for groups like ISIS or Boko Harem?
They haven’t posted anything yet.
‘Official verified’ isn’t a thing on bluesky. It’s self-verification, just means you own the domain.
Most western governments are terrorist. Can you name an administration that isn’t guilty of war crimes? Should they all be automatically blocked from socials?
Should they all be automatically blocked from socials?
For companies that have morals or a backbone, abso fucking lutely
True they have been guilty for a while, but they didn’t always post like they have been now, as a part of DHS who posts nothing but fascist propaganda on other social media these days I doubt their posts would be different. ICE is actively recruiting so just having the account is an ad for joining, not that different than a corporate business social media. I agree with the idea that a communication platform should be neutral politically, in general, but it is a special situation when an agency is currently waging a violent campaign and uses social media to further their agenda and blurring of the truth. They are a government agency but not a necessary one and it’s not essential they are allowed on a third-party social media platform, it could be argued their conduct and behavior as a group is already against the policies of Bluesky like condoning violence.
But anyway I agree they shouldn’t necessarily be blocked preemptively, a rogue poster could use the account to say “ICE are terrorist thugs” or something.
ICE is attacking and brutalizing people, daily. Killing them. Blinding them. They do not deserve any platform for them to post their hate.
Haven’t posted yet? So what? This is some dumbass free speech absolutism that brought us to timelines like these.
US govt has been doing that for a long time outside America. Obama incinerated plenty of kids where’s the calls to have him removed?
Just seems a bit racist is all
They have already posted a job ad to join a violent fascist paramilitary in their profile.
The claim that Bluesky “verifies Nazis” because ICE got a blue check is peak absurdity—it’s a government agency enforcing immigration law, not goose-stepping brownshirts.
Verification confirms identity/authenticity (anti-impersonation), not endorsement, letting users freely mute/block ICE while spotting fakes (pro/anti-ICE sock puppets).
To the history blind people comparing ICE to Nazis, If ICE were “Nazis,” 2025 inauguration riots get crushed Day 1 with tanks, not due process.
Reality: routine deportations ≠ death camps.
routine deportations ≠ death camps
You’re right, but I do think the deaths in the death camps make them death camps.
Cool story what do you think about Elon Musk
Bold of you to assume this person thinks
Good one… Let’s only suppress speach we dont like… Take off your progressive glasses and look at what happened then vs. now. If you honestly did, you’d see how lazy of an argument it is.
Going to go a step further to point out that freedom of speech only applies to people, not organizations. Put on your reading comprehension glasses and see how lazy of a thinker you are.
Fixed it for you because you can’t recognize the difference between a joke and an argument
How about kick them off the platform? Make a big deal about doing it. Tell them to fuck off. Stop tolerating intolerance. I don’t know how blue sky works, but surely there is a way to kick them off of the platform.
Bsky is actually quite centralized. Bluesky the company owns the only full-network indexer (I think they call it a “relay” or something), which collects posts from all other servers and allows those posts to be rendered by various apps (e.g. bsky.app, but all other frontends use the same indexer). They could just ban them at indexer level.
But even that is moot, because they are letting them host their account on a server Bluesky the company owns, bsky.social.
There’s another relay: https://atproto.africa/ .
Relays don’t index posts, they collect them from different servers, and provide a “firehouse” of events.
You can crawl pdses directly, akin to the fediverse. AppViewLite does this (and is lightweight enough to run on a phone).
You don’t need a relay or appview with https://reddwarf.app/ .
The fediverse also has relays.
Good to know there’s a second full-network relay (assuming this is what it is). Last time I checked all third-party relays only indexed some sections of the network, so my knowledge was outdated.
Conceptually relays are the indexers of the network, you can view individual PDSes without them, but you won’t get cross-PDS discovery; this is because PDSes don’t actually federate with each other.
This means that in practice, relays define what it means to be “on bluesky”. If you are banned on all relays, your PDS becomes just a weird standalone microblog.
This is different from the fediverse, where all instances federate with each other by default and relays just enhance discoverability and connectivity, rather than being the only way to do it.
And in any case this is all a bit academic, bluesky are hosting nazis on their own PDS, bsky.social.
Nah tolerating intolerance has been working out well so far. I mean “free speech” is worth literally any price, and further, we should never pressure private companies to align with common morality. That’s just censorship!!
HUGE /s, and thank you for an actually sane take ITT.
This makes ICE much easier to block.
The block log is public. It’s basically giving uncle Sam a list of targets to hit next.
Instead burn the bridge connecting to bake, or ignore the account clientside which is not public.
It’s basically giving uncle Sam a list of targets to hit next.
How, exactly? Even if you use your real name as your username (which no one does), unless it’s very uncommon, that still won’t uniquely identify you.
You don’t have to be such a bitch about everything. If you guys can’t even work up the courage to block a government account on an obscure social media site for fear of reprisal then you might as well enroll yourself for deportation right now because you clearly don’t have what it takes to do anything actually useful to stop all this.
You hurt someone’s feelings, but are extremely accurate.
Lemmy blocks are really just mutes. On mastodon, admins can see if you blocked someone.
The fediverse really isn’t better in this regard.
On paper it’s a government agency which would normally be allowed to have verification.
However it is a government agency functioning more like a hate group, right now very inimical to the concept and idea of civil rights (already enshrined as law), and hostile to diversity and social justice; with absolutely no regulation of its activities, it is an agency mandated directly by the executive to remove anyone who is not white and Christian.
Why does Bluesky have to verify them? They are a terror group, using social media to recruit and further their racist terrorism. I don’t think they should be pre-emptively banned necessarily but I don’t buy these arguments here about how they must be given a microphone to broadcast nazi messages.
Why are people so max about this?
Because they want corporations to do their job for them of holding the government accountable.
The thing is that I kinda dont like the idea of stopping people from freely expressing themselves, but I do agree to the fact that allowing them to be verified might be another small piece of legitimizaiton. We shoudl all be defending democracy, but when does tollerating intollerants become harmfui? A tolerant society shouldn’t tolerate intolerant people
People can freely express themselves. Giving a domestic terror organization run by the government extra legitimacy by “verifying” them has nothing to do with free speech. It amplifies their message over the speech of actual people.
