• by Colin Kirkland , November 4, 2024

As Elon Musk overshadows X with his own political support for former president Donald Trump, up-and-coming decentralized microblogging app and X competitor Bluesky has detailed its plans for election safety ahead of Tuesday's U.S. presidential election.

Bluesky's election integrity operations are being led by Aaron Rodericks, the company's new head of Trust and Safety, who previously held the same title at the former Twitter (now X) until he was fired last year by Musk, along with half of the platform's election integrity team.

Prior to being fired at Twitter, however, Rodericks became part of the public discourse last year when right-wing social-media personalities called him out for seeking more content-moderation staffers ahead of the 2024 election who had “a passion for protecting the integrity of elections and civic events.”

It now seems Rodericks may repurpose his original plan to uphold election integrity at Bluesky, which supports his attempts to safeguard the growing app against the threat of potential misinformation designed to mislead users during this election, such as posts that might disrupt the voting process or AI-generated posts that are intended to confuse the public.

Rodericks and Bluesky's election integrity team have laid out their plan for the upcoming weeks via a series of in-app posts, which state that the team will be “reviewing content for potential misinformation and unconfirmed information regarding claims about the U.S. election.”

The team is reminding users that they can report posts to the moderation service, which will then be removed if the content “encourages or glorifies intimidation or disruption in voting, tabulation, or certification.” Bluesky says it will also label emerging reports as “unconfirmed” until the company is able to verify them.

Because Bluesky's decentralized platform models allows anyone to run their own server and devise their own moderation service, the platform relies on user-issued reports.

“Our online experience doesn’t have to depend on billionaires unilaterally making decisions over what we see,” the company stated in March. “On an open social network like Bluesky, you can shape your experience for yourself.”

Bluesky has also said it will closely monitor the post-election period in order “to identify and address any disruptions to the peaceful transition of power,” alluding to the events which led to an attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Rodericks says that because of a recent increase in users -- brought on by X's temporary ban in Brazil, as well as its X's changes -- it has received more reports than usual and has since hired more moderators.

“We triage reports to ensure the most severe violations are addressed quickly,” the team says, adding that it will roll out additional in-app “interventions” as needed to help ensure a safe and accurate election process.