this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2026
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It's a good thing they get verified. It means they can not take back anything they post and they have to take accountability for the account.
Do you think it would be better if they didn't verify it and let them spread misinformation and propaganda with plausible deniability?
Yeah I really don't see why everyone is upset about this. Should be upset that ICE exists but not but they have an official bluesky account. This is basically the same as going "yep they're real".
This is just more weird Mastodon elitism.
I look forward to them being confronted with views they can't just ask Elon to delete.
But, let's be real here, this is rage bait to track people using their first amendment rights in a way they don't love. BSKY doesn't need to give up anything on users. Users accessing BSKY ip addresses given up by their ISP will be more than enough for Palintir to find. A few links with trackers provide browser fingerprinting. Easy day for them.
Be careful, y'all.
They completely deindexed Link (spacelawshitpost.me) for not showing appropriate reverence for Charlie Kirk after he died by pointing to their TOS policy on promoting violence, but an organisation that only exists to exert violence on non-white people gets a pass.
It's better if the nazis were permabanned from their indexer thingy. Otherwise it's just a nazi bar.
Imagine if in the 30s, some newspaper allowed the Gestapo to run ads and write an opinion column. Would you be defending them?
Labeling the account as verified and excluding/not excluding from the AppView are two separate actions.
It is a clear indication that they don't intend to ban the account, they have verified it on their own server. They are two separate actions, but one implies that the other will not be done.
And in any case, I'm pointing out that the dichotomy between "verify ICE and let them post nazi propaganda officially" and "let ICE post nazi propaganda with plausible deniability" is false, they can (should) just ban them.
This is false.
Do you expect bsky to ban ICE? They already have a job posting to join the Gestapo in their profile, is that not enough?
Someone at bsky verification team looked at this, and instead of flagging the account to be reviewed and removed, they pressed the "verify" button. If you give them the benefit of doubt, this was a mistake from someone on the verification team, but realistically speaking a corporate platform turning into a Nazi bar is quite natural nowadays.
I don't know how else to say it: you keep falling into the same non-sequitur.
No, I don't expect them to ban anyone from the government. And, no, I don't think it would be wise to do it: verifying the account does not mean they are supporting it, it just means they are making sure that whatever crap ICE is saying can not go around without accountability.
If you don't want to see their shitty posts, now you can simply filter it out. And thanks to verification, you can share your filters to others. That's how decentralized systems work. Bluesky does not control who I get to see. ICE or any other institution can not buy its way into manufacturing propaganda. It's not ideal, but it's better than any of the existing alternatives.
So, you would be OK with a newspaper accepting ads and publishing an opinion column from Gestapo or SS? They were official government organizations after all.
You are once again presenting a false dichotomy. The choice is not only between "verify" and "not verify", there is also the option to "ban". Banning ICE would not let them post Nazi propaganda on their platform at all.
They literally can. Except in this case they didn't even have to pay, the corporate overlords of bluesky will let them post propaganda for free.
What I am "OK with" has no impact whatsoever in "what actually gets to happen". I rather not waste my energy on the things that I can not control.
It would. They would just do it from unverified accounts. Worse still, they would be able to post it and completely deny it if confronted about it.
Spammers also get to send millions of messages every day for "free", but we mostly ignore it because we are able to filter them out. Sure, it would be great to completely get rid of spam and the phishing industry... but there is no way to completely get rid of them that does not involve increasing the surveillance aparattus and given more power to a centralized enforcer, so if I have to choose between spammers and corporate-controlled communicatioins, I will take the spammers any day.
You are in control of which social media you use, and even more so in control about which companies you choose to support or defend. You are currently spending your energy defending a company that is hosting a de-facto nazi account on their servers.
Let me rephrase the question. If a newspaper you enjoy reading started publishing a column from Gestapo, what would you do? Would you boycott and complain? Would you just complain and keep buying it? Or would you keep buying it and defend their actions by "well I can just skip that page with the nazi propaganda on it"?
Well, yeah, but that would take effort in creating&advertising new accounts. Why make their nazi jobs easier?
There is literally nothing stopping them from doing it now. Having a verified account does not impede their ability to create fake unverified accounts in any way.
I would agree with this (except bluesky is also corporate-controlled). There is no way to completely cut out spam, including nazi spam.
But in this case someone from Bluesky looked at this account which self-identifies as a nazi organization, verified that it belongs to a nazi organization, and hasn't banned it. It is clearly different.
I don't use or support Bluesky.
I'm not defending anyone. I am just looking at a stated claim (Bluesky is as bad as Twitter because they verified ICE) and evaluating if it has merits. I don't think it does.
The "newspaper I enjoy reading" is the WWW. The reason that I don't buy newspapers is because I want to keep the power to curate the information that I receive. As long as I am reasonably in control of the information that I can access, I see no point in complaining about it.
If you want to make a parallel to Reddit: despite it being 99% filled with crap that I don't care about, I could use it just fine and ignore all the drama. But when they decided to change the terms of the API and they were trying to force the specific channel to use to access it, then I immediately "stopped enjoying it" and went on to work on a solution to be back in control.
I don't think that's the claim, at least that's not the way I'm reading it.
Here is the quote we are discussing:
Let me spell it out the way I understand it:
Bluesky is knowingly hosting nazis. The verification here just displays the mens rea: rather than them just not noticing the account, they know about it and still haven't banned it.
Bluesky is not as bad as Twitter right now. However, this is the quintessential beginning of a Nazi bar, which means it will eventually become as bad as Twitter.
The Fediverse is not knowingly hosting nazis. Instances ban nazi accounts, and those that don't are considered nazi instances and are quickly defederated by 99% of other instances. This is the minimum that I expect of Bluesky too, since it's a centralized platform and should be better at moderation.
I think there is a significant problem in platforming nazis. It gives this vile ideology a voice and a means to spread. Especially given the state of media literacy and critical thinking in the West, a lot of people don't know how to control which information they see, and makes them susceptible to this manipulation. Fascism is rising through social media misinfo right now, as we discuss this, so it is very important to complain about it as loud as possible.
[Citation needed]
It would be better if they wouldn't even be platformed at all. We don't need no federation with Nazis.