Update: After this article was published, Bluesky restored Kabas’ post and told 404 Media the following: “This was a case of our moderators applying the policy for non-consensual AI content strictly. After re-evaluating the newsworthy context, the moderation team is reinstating those posts.”
Bluesky deleted a viral, AI-generated protest video in which Donald Trump is sucking on Elon Musk’s toes because its moderators said it was “non-consensual explicit material.” The video was broadcast on televisions inside the office Housing and Urban Development earlier this week, and quickly went viral on Bluesky and Twitter.
Independent journalist Marisa Kabas obtained a video from a government employee and posted it on Bluesky, where it went viral. Tuesday night, Bluesky moderators deleted the video because they said it was “non-consensual explicit material.”
Other Bluesky users said that versions of the video they uploaded were also deleted, though it is still possible to find the video on the platform.
Technically speaking, the AI video of Trump sucking Musk’s toes, which had the words “LONG LIVE THE REAL KING” shown on top of it, is a nonconsensual AI-generated video, because Trump and Musk did not agree to it. But social media platform content moderation policies have always had carve outs that allow for the criticism of powerful people, especially the world’s richest man and the literal president of the United States.
For example, we once obtained Facebook’s internal rules about sexual content for content moderators, which included broad carveouts to allow for sexual content that criticized public figures and politicians. The First Amendment, which does not apply to social media companies but is relevant considering that Bluesky told Kabas she could not use the platform to “break the law,” has essentially unlimited protection for criticizing public figures in the way this video is doing.
Content moderation has been one of Bluesky’s growing pains over the last few months. The platform has millions of users but only a few dozen employees, meaning that perfect content moderation is impossible, and a lot of it necessarily needs to be automated. This is going to lead to mistakes. But the video Kabas posted was one of the most popular posts on the platform earlier this week and resulted in a national conversation about the protest. Deleting it—whether accidentally or because its moderation rules are so strict as to not allow for this type of reporting on a protest against the President of the United States—is a problem.
I’m confused as to why this 404media story neglected to link to the post in question.
to get from this article to the post that it is about, i had to type in the bsky username from the screenshot and scroll through the timeline. to save others the effort:
https://bsky.app/profile/marisakabas.bsky.social/post/3liwlwvvq6k2s is the post which was removed.
https://bsky.app/profile/marisakabas.bsky.social/post/3lj3yrzc6is2p is the thread about it being removed and later restored.
Here’s my take on it:
- I don’t care about AI being used on public figures, if you won’t want people to use you, don’t be in public, or ruin the government. No one has made AI featuring me.
- This is no different than a political cartoon, the only difference is no one made it directly by hand.
- Bluesky doesn’t have to host it, but I also would want it applied equally. If this was perma-removed, all AI or all political shit would be. I don’t like it, but selective moderating is what got us Trump in the first place with Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit.
- I don’t like queerphobic shit being used to call out Trump and Musk. Use their actual actions and words, not “haha they gay”. It’s just wild how certain kinds of informal bigtry are okay when you use them on people who are evil. Like the people who constantly insult Trump’s weight because he’s evil. Maybe he’s just evil and happens to be fat.
- And let’s not pretend Jack Dorsey is somehow a saint when he only removed Trump from twitter after Jan 6. Nothing before despite how horrid Trump was. I credit Jack Dorsey to enabling Trump, and it’s why I refuse to join “Twitter 2 made by the guy who enabled Twitter to be the shit place it was”.
please stop being weird and gross
also please no more ‘look bad person do gay’ content
You needlessly choose to take offence. It shows who is sub and who dom. It doesn’t matter, except to you it seems, what sex they have
You needlessly choose to take offence
KKK
No, they literally make a choice to make it about being gay and I honestly don’t think that many people even thought about that aspect. I don’t even know that they aren’t gay for all I know, I don’t care.
Yeah. The means must absolutely align with the ends, and this video reeks of privileged white guy mad that he got his cushy desk job in DC ripped out from under him.
Whoever made this shit is no comrade and I’m sick of liberals sharing this everywhere
The fact that a .world is aruging to use this weird homophobic video as a protest is just proving your point.
It’s like how people think sharing that one image of Putin with drag make up is somehow a Gotcha to Putin, who probably doesn’t even care. Wow, ya sure showed that dictator by posting a meme that uses gay stereotypes!
Yeah, .world gonna .world
“You’re not protesting the right way! You have to stand up to them only in ways that are acceptable to me!”
Got it buddy.
A protest is throwing a brick through a window. This ain’t no protest.
It is unanimously considered a protest. Why do you think you decide, not the people?
Cause people are fucking stupid. You’re a great example
Communism 101
Yeah I hate Musk and Trump for lots of things. I don’t think using “haha they might be kissing each other! Musk sucks Trumps dick!” is somehow effective criticism of actual fascists in office.
Maybe we can criticize and protest and organize without using shit rooted in queerphobia. Might as well just say “Well Trump probably cross dresses, that shows him!”
it’s #darkwoke, the only people who are offended by this are the Nazi’s, and that is exactly who we should be offending
I don’t think using “haha they might be kissing each other! Musk sucks Trumps dick!” is somehow effective criticism of actual fascists in office.
It is, for them.
Especially having Trump be “the bottom”.
Ever watch Shameless, the US version? Its along the same lines as Terry, Mickey’s dad. He only hated Mickey because he was catching, because “It aint gay if you’re doing the fucking, just if you get fucked”.
So, in this case, yes, making implications of gay sex happening, with Trump catching, is VERY effective at it.
It is, for them.
Fucking crazy you think this is making them sweat at all
all you’re doing is giving them completely valid ammo that liberal ‘virtue signaling’ is completely hollow because look at your hypocritical behavior
not to mention telling all the queers you snarl at every 2-4 years to vote for you exactly how you feel about them
Queer and trans friends of mine were also laughing their asses off at this video…
And yes, calling out Trump as being the “beta cuck” to Elon DOES cause discomfort for a narcissist like Melania’s husband.
And it’s the sort of thing to push, to cause fractures in the white house.
I don’t know, man. Seems to me conservatives let shit like that fester, while ignoring it (or further festering it) while they do the real dirty work in buried headlines.
They let us have the fun while they quietly pull everything out from under us.
But, at the same time, it’s just going to happen. People are frustrated with very little perceived outlet.
Let me use another example: calling them “weird”.
It doesn’t matter to a rational person if another person calls them weird.
It matters to Reich wingers, who base their whole self identity on “matching the ideal”.
Yeah guys, fuck bluesky.
Already showing its true colors of “We’ll abuse our power when we want to and only reneg if there’s sufficient backlash.”
Recommend MASTODON, NOT BLUESKY.
If you allow it for people you don’t like, where the bar for others.
Not a fan of the AI video but this kind of thinking is very very stupid. Take that cop out of your head.
This is no different than a really well drawn political cartoon.
Politicians shouldn’t have the power to control the kinds of things you say about politicians.
Amazed people saying it is correct decision! This is two public figures and doing art or any form of expression material with their image should be protected under freedom of speech.
I don’t believe Bluesky is a part of the government. Legally, they are allowed to censor as they please on their own platform.
I’m not here to discuss how we need to be ethical in response to a fascist takeover. So we gotta play by the rules but they don’t?
exactly, we should drop this approach of taking the high road, until they are gone
Resistance need not be ethical. This isn’t resistance.
I made account on bluesky to post drawings and no seeing AI slop. I hate Elon Musk, but I don’t consider seeing AI generated lemon party as funny thing. It’s one of the reason why I don’t use Twitter anymore.
Correct. this is indeed the correct decision to remove the thing. BUT i have a feeling that this quick reaction does not compare to the speed of decision for normal people, especially women who get this kind of stuff made about them.
Also, note that I’m not saying it was bad to make the video, or have it run in public on hacked screens.
That is perfectly fine political commentary, by means of civil disobedience.Just that Bluesky is correct in it’s action to remove it from their service.
I seem to be in the minority here, but I am extremely uncomfortable the idea of non-consensual AI porn of anyone. Even people I despise. It’s so unethical that it just disgusts me. I understand why there are exceptions for those in positions of power, but I’d be more than happy to live in a world where there weren’t.
Oh no think of the children. Poooooooorn
porn
Oh, saving the children are you.
Its a picture of trump sucking elons toes. Conflating that with the idea of “porn” is a bit of an overreach in light of how rare toe fetish people are. I imagine you can find a tiny popyulation of people who consider anything erotic. Wearing cotton. Having a roastbeef sandwhich in your hand. Styling hair a certain way. Being an asian female.
Want to ban all of that too?
Thank you for your thoughtful and considered comment, which definitely did not strawman my rather mild position or blow it out of proportion at all.
Also this wasn’t meant to be a “save the children” argument. Screw that. Can’t I just be uncomfortable with something and express it without people acting like I’m a puritan wanting to ban porn?
I think the important point in this case is not that the content is acceptable, but that it is newsworthy.
If somebody made the video and posted it, I could see it being permanently taken down. And it was at first, per the letter of their policy.
But the fact that government employees had it playing on government property inside government facilities, to protest some extreme and historical stuff going on, means it should be recorded for the public and for history.
I look at it much the same way as the photos of upside down American flags that various government employees put up. Just posting an upside down flag and saying how America is wrong is an opinion like any other that would get lost in the noise. But when it’s people inside the government intending it as a sign of distress, very much more newsworthy and important to record.
In this case, it’s clearly a form of speech and therefore protected under the 1st amendment.
I also don’t understand such a strong reaction to non-consensual AI porn. I mean, I don’t think it’s in good taste but I also don’t see why it warrants such a strong reaction. It’s not real. If I draw a stick figure with boobs and I put your name on it, do you believe I am committing a crime?
Nobody’s going to mistake that stick figure for the real me, though.
Protected from government censorship. Companies have strong protections allowing for controlling the speech on their platforms.
And if you asked Roberts he’d probably say since companies are people, as long as it’s used to protect conservatives they have protection for controlling their platforms speech as a 1st amendment right.
I agree. I’ve thought about it a lot and I still don’t have any sympathy for them after the harm they’ve caused. I see why it’s news worthy enough they might reverse it, and why it would be political speech.
But also I think they made the right choice to take it down. If blsky wants to be the better platform, it needs to be better. And not having an exception for this is the right thing.
In my country the laws about publishing photos etc are different for anyone an “people of public interest”. So yeah imo it should be okay to create cartoons or whatever of politicians without their permission - not porn ofc. Including ai generated stuff, but that one should be marked as such , given how realistic it is now
I agree with you.
However…there’s an argument to be made that the post itself is a form of criticism and falls under the free speech rules where it regards political figures. In many ways, it’s not any different than the drawings of Musk holding Trump’s puppet strings, or Putin and Trump riding a horse together. One is drawn and the other is animated, but they’re the same basic concept.
I understand however that that sets a disturbing precedent for what can and cannot be acceptable. But I don’t know where to draw that line. I just know that it has to be drawn somewhere.
I think…and this is my opinion…political figures are fair game for this, while there should be protections in place for private citizens, since political figures by their very ambition put themselves in the public sphere whereas private individuals do not.
In my opinion, public figures, including celebrities, give a degree of consent implicitly by seeking to be public figures. I dont think that for celebrities that should extend to lewd or objectionable material, but if your behavior has been to seek being a public figure you can’t be upset when people use your likeness in various ways.
For politicians, I would default to “literally everything is protected free speech”, with exceptions relating to things that are definitively false, damaging and unrelated to their public work.
“I have a picture of Elon musk engaging in pedophillia” is all those, and would be justifiably removed. Anything short of that though should be permitted.
Anything bad that happens to a conservative is good. The world will only get better if they are made to repeatedly suffer.
No, we cannot think like that. It is true that fascism cannot be beat peacefully, but we should never want them to suffer. We should always strive to crush their fascist oligarchy with as little suffering ss possible.
“Whoever would be a slayer of monsters must take heed, or they may become the very monsters they slay… For when one peers into the abyss, the abyss peers back into thee” -FN
but we should never want them to suffer
No, we should, actually. It’s what they want for others and is the only way they might come to an understanding with what’s wrong with them.
Sympathy for the fascists is almost equal to support of them afaic
They don’t believe anything they aren’t experiencing first hand is actually a problem.
As much as I don’t like it, they have clearly made their own personal suffering a prerequisite for any solutions being allowed to move forward
Where do you draw the line for the rich fucks of the world? Realistic CGI? Realistic drawings? Edited photos?
This is what I was thinking about myself. Because we’re cool with political caricatures, right?
I guess the problem is that nobody wants to feature in non-consensual AI porn. I mean if you’d want to draw me getting shafted by Musk, that’d be weird, but a highly realistic video of the same event, that would be hard to explain to the missus.
I guess “obviously Elon Musk would never go for a guy like me” would be the wrong answer
Assuming you’re asking out of genuine curiosity, for me personally, I’d draw the line somewhere along “could this, or any frame of this, be mistaken for a real depiction of these people?” and “if this were a depiction of real children, how hard would the FBI come down on you?”
I understand that that’s not a practical way of creating law or moderating content, but I don’t care because I’m talking about my personal preference/comfort level. Not what I think should be policy. And frankly, I don’t know what should be policy or how to word it all in anti-loopholes lawyer-speak. I just know that this sucking toes thing crosses an ethical line for me and personally I hate it.
Putting it more idealistically: when I imagine living in utopia, non-consensual AI porn of people doesn’t exist in it. So in an effort to get closer to utopia, I disapprove of things that would not exist in an utopia.
Bluesky will become just the same az elonx…
It already is
Bluesky had better take care that they not act like other cowardly tech media
So you don’t remember Jack Dorsey’s shenanigans ?
No. I don’t
This guy censored the POTUS (Granted it was Trump)
If they don’t it is only because they are waiting to obtain a higher share of the social media market.
Jumping ship from one corporate owned social media to another corporate owned social media isn’t a smart move. There is nothing about Bluesky that will prevent it from becoming X in the future. People joining now are only adding to the network effect that will make leaving more difficult in a decade or two.
The problem of social media won’t be solved by choosing which dictator’s rule you want to live under. You don’t have the freedom to speak and express yourself if you give someone veto power over what you write.
Ah, the rewards of moderation: the best move is not to play. Fuck it is & has always been a better answer. Anarchy of the early internet was better than letting some paternalistic authority decide the right images & words to allow us to see, and decentralization isn’t a bad idea.
Yet the forward-thinking people of today know better and insist that with their brave, new moderation they’ll paternalize better without stopping to acknowledge how horribly broken, arbitrary, & fallible that entire approach is. Instead of learning what we already knew, social media keeps repeating the same dumb mistakes.
You clearly never were the victim back in those days. Neither do you realize this approach doesn’t work on the modern web even in the slightest, unless you want the basics of both enlightenment and therefore science and democracy crumbling down even faster.
Anarchism is never an answer, it’s usually willful ignorance about there being any problems.
Pretty much everyone used anonymous handles, so it was hard to be a victim, and very easy to disregard junk we didn’t like.
I’m sensing strong overtones of a victim complex and excessive catastrophizing. You know they’re images & words on a screen, right?
Enlightenment gives us freedom of expression. It seems uninformed & backward to assume faceless moderators of some private organization are the defenders of enlightenment, freedom, & democracy (especially while arguing against too much freedom).
Centralized moderation & curation algorithms got us filter bubbles & echo chambers personalizing the information people consume, distorting their perceptions. It feeds users information they want to see (often polarizing them with extremist ideas) to keep them engaged on the platform & maintain a steady stream of ad revenue. Rather than defend enlightened principles of society, we observe & can continue to expect moderators to serve their own interests.
Internet anarchy is a pretty good answer to that.
Dude, you do realize I didn’t endorse centralized moderation with a single word, let alone social algorithms or any of the other trash? I’m just not ignorant enough to believe the internet wouldn’t become an utter pile of trash without any kind of moderation of oversight, especially with such an abundance of ways to spread nonsense fully automatically. Want to get a glimpse of how that would look like? Look at Nostr. Given you’re literally starting off with ad hominem any discussion with you is pointless anyway though.
Anarchism is never an answer
This isn’t anarchism, as described. Anarchism, like actual anarchism, is the only likely solution, imo. No gods, no masters, no idols.
A perfect breeding ground for growing localized power structures that aren’t bound to anything holding them back. A power vacuum will always fill itself. To gain control over it as a society (i.e. democracy) is one of the greatest achievements of mankind. We have to keep improving it (by reforming how economical powers can or can not exercise power or grow), not moving to something that’s so obviously disregarding how power structures form and behave in human societies.
A perfect breeding ground for growing localized power structures that aren’t bound to anything holding them back
Ok, read up a little about anarchism, and come back to the discussion. I can provide a starter primer, if you like.
To gain control over it as a society (i.e. democracy) is one of the greatest achievements of mankind.
The only control is the ruling class over the working class. I don’t think that’s a great achievement.
The only control is the ruling class over the working class. I don’t think that’s a great achievement.
That’s a result of systems like capitalism, not democracy in itself. 🙄 Read up a little about the concept of democracy (and what isn’t part of it) and come back to the discussion.
Solution involves answers where to get energy to dig in the gods, masters and idols. They are well-armed and those seeking solutions are not.
Anarchism is never an answer, it’s usually willful ignorance about there being any problems.
AnCaps drive me nuts. They want to dismantle democratic institutions while simultaneously licking the boots of unelected institutions.
People against ancaps usually only disagree with them in the way institutions are being dismantled.
In any case looking through the eyes of an ancap you might get valuable insights, and this thought should be obvious for an intelligent person of any school in regards to any other.
I guess I don’t really consider AnCaps to be Anarchists because Anarchy is generally leftist philosophy. Traditional anarchy is like small government socialism: empowered local unions and city governments.
I think there’s a huge difference between fighting bullying or hate speech against minorities. Another thing is making fun of very specific and very public people.
Elon acts like a new Reddit mod drunk on power. He is the guy screaming in the comments that he knows how to run a forum better and seized the chance, and now he cannot fathom why people hate him.
I miss the early days of the internet when it was still a wild west.
Something like I hate you myg0t 2 or Pico’s School would have gotten the creators cancelled if released in 2025.
Note on the term canceling. Independent creators cannot, by definition, get canceled. Unless you literally are under a production or publishing contract that gets actually canceled due to something you said or did, you were not canceled. Being unpopular is not getting canceled, neither is receiving public outrage due to being bad or unpopular. Even in a figurative sense, just the fact that the videos were published to YouTube and can still be viewed means they were not canceled. They just fell out of the zeitgeist and aren’t popular anymore, that happens to 99% of entertainment content.
You do remember snuff and goatse and csam of the early internet, I hope.
Even with that of course it was better, because that stuff still floats around, and small groups of enjoyers easily find ways to share it over mainstream platforms.
I’m not even talking about big groups of enjoyers, ISIS (rebranded sometimes), Turkey, Azerbaijan, Israel, Myanma’s regime, cartels and everyone share what they want of snuff genre, and it holds long enough.
In text communication their points of view are also less likely to be banned or suppressed than mine.
So yes.
Yet the forward-thinking people of today know better and insist that with their brave, new moderation they’ll paternalize better
They don’t think so, just use the opportunity to do this stuff in area where immunity against it is not yet established.
There are very few stupid people in positions of power, competition is a bitch.
I’m weirded out when people say they want zero moderation. I really don’t want to see any more beheading or CSAM and moderation can prevent that.
Moderation should be optional .
Say, a message may have any amount of “moderating authority” verdicts, where a user might set up whether they see only messages vetted by authority A, only by authority B, only by A logical-or B, or all messages not blacklisted by authority A, and plenty of other variants, say, we trust authority C unless authority F thinks otherwise, because we trust authority F to know things C is trying to reduce in visibility.
Filtering and censorship are two different tasks. We don’t need censorship to avoid seeing CSAM. Filtering is enough.
This fallacy is very easy to encounter, people justify by their unwillingness to encounter something the need to censor it for everyone as if that were not solvable. They also refuse to see that’s technically solvable. Such a “verdict” from moderation authority, by the way, is as hard to do as an upvote or a downvote.
For a human or even a group of humans it’s hard to pre-moderate every post in a period of time, but that’s solvable too - by putting, yes, an AI classifier before humans and making humans check only uncertain cases (or certain ones someone complained about, or certain ones another good moderation authority flagged the opposite, you get the idea).
I like that subject, I think it’s very important for the Web to have a good future.
people justify by their unwillingness to encounter something the need to censor it for everyone…
I can’t engage in good faith with someone who says this about CSAM.
Filtering and censorship are two different tasks. We don’t need censorship to avoid seeing CSAM. Filtering is enough.
No it is not. People are not tagging their shit properly when it is illegal.
I can’t engage in good faith
Right, you can’t.
If someone posts CSAM, police should get their butts to that someone’s place.
No it is not. People are not tagging their shit properly when it is illegal.
What I described doesn’t have anything to do with people tagging what they post. It’s about users choosing the logic of interpreting moderation decisions. But I’ve described it very clearly in the previous comment, so please read it or leave the thread.
Fuck it is & has always been a better answer
Sure. Unless you live in a place that have laws and laws enforcement. In that case, it’s “fuck it and get burnt down”.
You need some kind of moderation for user generated content, even if it’s only to comply with takedowns related to law (and I’m not talking about DMCA).
Well, yes: gotta comply with the law. Legal violations are often quite clear, and removing illegal content is justifiable. Can’t fault anyone for following the law.
It’s the extra moderation that’s problematic. People yearning for their corporate authorities to command the right words & images to appear on a screen & calling that progress feels quite backward like our ancestors fought so hard to gain these freedoms that our spoiled generation will so easily cede away to some nobodies at the slightest often imaginary inconvenience.
I feel like it’s a balancing act and you can’t make everyone happy. I, personally, don’t hang around unmoderated communities because they are often worse: hostile, full of spam and questionable content… so basically /b/. But even 4chan is moderated to an extent shrug
I had to hack an ex’s account once to get the revenge porn they posted of me taken down.
There’s a balance at the end of the day.
Illegal content has always been unprotected & subject to removal by the law. Moderation policies wouldn’t necessarily remove porn presumed to be legal, either, so moderation is still a crapshoot.
Still, that sucks.
I don’t want to watch this video please
WTF bluesky.
More trash
Bluesky is BS
