Social platforms are not neutral

Since I was a teenager, the obvious call-out was that cable news led American party politics. Fox emphasized their high ratings like an approval poll and politicians followed the channel's cues. Some other press orgs aspired toward more neutrality, but it's hard to know what that means these days.

For a while, social media tried to be politically neutral. Moderation is difficult as a practical task, and fighting over the decisions and policy - and risking revenue over it - is bad business.

But it was somewhat obvious to everyone that social platform neutrality was a performative fiction, even before Musk discarded the norm and gave X an overt political mission. Having done so successfully, there is no question about it now. Social platforms are at minimum opinionated, and at maximum are overtly partisan.

What's biased, and what's not? Social media is a competitive arena of attention and persuasion. The moderation rules reflect some values system, and not everybody agrees upon those values. Even the decision to reduce politics in users' feeds can be seen as a political act.

Are social platforms a product, or a political project?

You want to connect to friends and have a good time (however you define that) and the opinions of one product's leadership may end up conflicting with yours. Social platforms do need to be opinionated though. The Internet is chaos and platforms need to make judgment calls.

Using a platform feels like tacit approval of management's politics, and your own ability to organize is controlled by the platform's algorithms and policies. It is inevitably political on some level.

Even an aggressively a-political stance is biased in some way.

Another way to look at "bias" is to widen your thinking past partisanship. A platform may be wholly disinterested in left vs right, but if it promotes influencers over friendships, or thirst traps over breaking news, then it still has a bias. A platform can't be neutral!

If social platforms can't be neutral, then they need to be interchangeable. That's the only way this doesn't spin out into a propagandic nightmare.

TV channels are interchangeable. You can swap them without buying a new TV. Cell phone networks are interchangeable. You keep your phone while switching between AT&T or Verizon.

Old social platforms are not interchangeable. Your account and your friendships are locked into the platforms. This means you can't actually express a choice. You stay because everybody else stayed.

New social platforms are interchangeable.

The Internet is neutral. It's infrastructure, like the roads. It doesn't try to control where you go; it just gets you there. We depend neutral infrastructure to live free lives.

Interchangeability is what new social platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon are doing, though with different technologies and different ideas on how to do it. When you hear people talk about decentralization or protocols, what they're talking about is making the social platforms interchangeable to solve this neutrality problem.

The new social platforms use neutral protocols so they can be both opinionated and interchangeable. Acknowledging that neutrality is impossible for a platform, we instead invested in shared infrastructure to backstop the risks of platform opinionation and the resulting bias.

Platforms choose what to recommend (with algorithms) and what to filter (with moderation). They disagree, but the new platforms do so while still connecting their users to each other as much as they can.

Competitive spaces do not operate in good faith. People play to win. This is why we regulate against monopolies and build consumer protections.

The Internet is no different, but we've never decided how to fairly govern the competitive spaces. That's what the new social platforms are trying to solve. By making the products interchangeable, they're essentially subject to user election.

The people that created Bluesky - myself included - think that social media has been trending bad for us. We all grew up as users (none of us worked on the first generation of social) and we have the same love/hate relationship that everybody else has. And we walked into this project with values shaped by that experience.

These opinions are going to shape Bluesky as a platform. There's a kind of dual mission that we embraced. On the one level, we created a neutral protocol to solve the systemic absence of neutrality and choice. On another level, we created a platform to drive an opinionated take on social. They go hand in hand: the killer app of a neutral protocol is an opinionated but interchangeable platform.

If I had to summarize those opinions, it would be this: social media doesn't have to be a bad time. It doesn't have to be adversarial, low-trust, and driven by outrage.

If that's right, and achievable, and what people want, then Bluesky as a platform has a bright future ahead of it. If that's wrong, then our users will interchange us with somebody that represents them better, as some have already chosen to do .