Everything Happens So Much: Bluesky's L'affaire Singal + Butternut Squash Soup
We live in the era of too much news, but even by those already-low standards, there's been too much goddamned news over the last two weeks. Every time I try to sit down and write one of these, something else happens. It's kind of been like this:
It's also kind of been like this, if one recalls their Walter Benjamin, since of course this is exactly what he wrote when contemplating Paul Klee's "Angelus Novus":
Bluesky Goes Critical
A month ago exactly, Bluesky hit the 15 million user mark: as I write this on December 13th, the site now has twenty-five million users (which you can monitor in real time via the ever-clever Jaz's dashboard). That is a truly astronomical rate of growth for a social media website. It might even be a historically unprecedented rate of growth for a social media website, though I haven't checked to confirm.
Unfortunately, this remarkable victory for Bluesky has become overshadowed this week by controversy involving a certain middling newsletter-guy with a bizarre obsession with harassing trans people.
You know, Jesse Singal, known for stunts like "publishing the medical records of minor children without their consent" and "openly defending and associating with users of one of the world's most notorious transphobic harassment websites."
It's about Singal himself as a singularly loathsome individual, but it's also much bigger than that.
First, some background.
Jesse Singal has 164,700 followers on Twitter/X at the time of writing, and he is known for posting screenshots of the accounts of people he disagrees with on matters related to transgender people. This then results in the target being harassed by hundreds of his fans. Singal has also been linked to a number of other instances in which he has harassed and legally threatened reporters and writers who write about trans issues.
Singal appears to have first joined Bluesky on December 1st (according to Clearsky data). On December 6th, his account appears to have been automatically suspended for potential impersonation, which was promptly corrected. On December 7th, Singal's Bluesky account was suspended again, and his account was again reinstated, possibly for the same automatic-impersonation reasons.
As is typical for Singal, it appears he's now sharing screenshots of a Bluesky user's posts on X. This Bluesky user has already blocked Singal, making it clear that she does not wish to interact with him, yet he appears to be evading her block to post screenshots of her posts on another platform anyway.
While Singal is not explicitly saying "I would like my X/Twitter followers to harass this person" - and of course he isn't going to say that - the implication is extremely clear to anyone who wasn't, as they say, born yesterday (and is even passingly aware of Singal's history). Like other transphobic and right-wing provocateurs of his ilk, he's highly skilled at stepping right up to the boundaries of social media website's guidelines and yelling I'M NOT ACTUALLY TOUCHING YOU.
Viewed in that light, this behavior appears to be a violation of Bluesky's Community Guidelines pertinent to harassment. And viewed in that light, I think Singal should be banned.
And yet, Bluesky hasn't banned Jesse Singal.
Why Hasn't Bluesky Banned Singal?
As I write this, the Bluesky community is responding to a Dec 13th post from Bluesky's safety account, which noted (among a number of other things) that "We do not currently take action on accounts that share Bluesky screenshots with commentary, unless that commentary violates our Guidelines. We will take action when someone's private information is shared without their consent, but only when it is personally identifiable and verifiable in-app."
The Bluesky Safety thread also heavily implies that Singal's account was only suspended automatically due to accidental concerns over impersonation, and restates that the moderation team focuses primarily on content and behavior that appears on Bluesky, not on other applications. It adds that the team does not "currently take action on accounts that share Bluesky screenshots with commentary, unless that commentary violates our Guidelines."
From one point of view, this is all logical and familiar enough, broadly echoing calls other social media moderation teams at other services have made.
From another point of view, which I and many others happen to share, this looks exactly like Singal once again getting away with working the refs, using methods he and others in his cadre of shithead social media agent provocateurs have perfected.
It's Singal once again capitalizing on the fact that he's smart enough not to explicitly say that his 164,700 Twitter followers should go out and harass the woman he happens to be screenshotting, even if the implication is patently obvious to everyone who's familiar with his shtick.
And I think it's pretty easy to tell the difference between say, me sharing a screenshot of a meme because it's funny and I want to credit the originator, as I did above, and Singal sharing a screenshot where he calls a woman who's blocked him, and who also happens to be a known voice in support of trans people, a liar.
Which is all very disappointing, because up until now, Bluesky's Trust and Safety team largely has been smart enough to avoid falling for this kind of thing. It's both depressing and out of character to watch these people, who I've come to genuinely respect since I joined Bluesky in early 2023, knuckle under to Singal's weasel-coded strategy.
I have no idea why this is happening. But I've seen a few theories circulating around.
Some people speculate that Bluesky's reticence to block Singal is linked to concerns that if they do, Singal will immediately kick off a legal campaign against Bluesky, which quite plausibly could be funded and encouraged by deep-pocketed individuals and entities linked to the likes of Musk and Trump.
While such a lawsuit probably wouldn't be successful, the logic goes that this would also be a time-sucking and potentially very expensive pain in the ass for Bluesky and its 20-person team, who have already been working obscene and inhumane hours to accommodate the website's batshit insane rate of growth since early November.
I'm not a lawyer: I have no idea how likely such a nuisance lawsuit might actually be, or if it would be relatively easy to fend off by means of anti-SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) measures. I also am by no means qualified to comment on how this feeds into concerns around Section 230, though here's some articles by people who actually are that you might want to check out.
Beyond an actual lawsuit, Bluesky may also be concerned - quite reasonably - about how banning Singal could lead to an outbreak of rabidly negative coverage of the website, targeted straight towards the jumpy and rabid eyeballs of Trump and Musk's most ardent supporters.
As Bluesky's moderation team is already hustling to keep up with the massive recent uptick in bot accounts, troll accounts, and virulently hate-filled harassment accounts - efforts that are bolstered by the work of unpaid community members who run blocklists and labeler services, and who could really use more security against wackos than they're currently getting - perhaps there's concern that such a shit-storm would be too much to deal with.
Again, I have no idea what's really going on behind the scenes.
But me and the well over 20,000 other people who've signed this online petition (including Lizzo!) would like a better explanation than we've received so far.
This is Bigger Than One Whiny Mediocrity
Which leads into my key takeaway from all of this: the Jesse Singal Ban controversy is a lot bigger than our least-favorite mediocre magazine columnist.
This is really about if American social media companies are legally and culturally permitted to enforce their rules equally on all users, even if those users happen to be people that hold views shared by Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
To put it another way: are we at a point where there's one set of rules governing online speech for you and me, and another set of rules entirely for people who agree with the ruling MAGA administration?
I think that L'affaire Singal speaks to some larger and very real concerns about just how far MAGA and Muskian America intends to take the Right to Post in 2024. And I share those concerns. I am genuinely worried that the Trump 2.0 Era will see considerably more intense efforts to destroy and remove access to online spaces where minorities, queer people, and women feel safe enough to express themselves.
As Adam Serwer observed in The Atlantic in 2022 (ironically, the outlet that published Singal's awful cover story on trans kids years ago), conservatives have invented the so-called "right to post": in other words, they believe that they are entitled to say whatever the hell they want on the internet.
They believe that everyone else should be forced to listen to the bigoted and cruel things they say, as the price of using social media at all. And they believe that neither website owners nor other users should be permitted to ban them, block them, or otherwise avoid exposure to their precious pearls of wisdom.
Meanwhile, Bluesky has largely become successful on the back of its mostly-realized promise to give users far more control over what posts and accounts they see and interact with in an environment that lacks an intentionally manipulative (and conflict-seeking) central-algorithm. This has been paired with the website's generally solid past commitment to banning actively harmful and harassment-focused accounts.
If you're Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, the fact that this sales pitch has convinced millions of people to join Bluesky over the last month is extremely concerning.
It blows up a lot of the certainties and assumptions that social media oligarchs have operated under for years, regarding what users can be forced to put up with. It also paints a target on Bluesky's back. I imagine this is extremely worrisome for Bluesky's team, and I know it's worrisome for the users (including me ) who have been enjoying a less hate-filled social media experience up until now.
Which, to return to L'affaire Singal, puts Bluesky's small and profoundly exhausted staff in an intensely unenviable position.
If Bluesky bans him, they risk even more heat from Musk and Trump's Eye of Sauron, which could result in everything from expensive lawsuits to mass harassment and bot campaigns to a sea of foul coverage in various MAGA-friendly major media outlets (which is, nowadays, just about all of them).
And if the Bluesky team don't ban Singal, they risk swiftly losing the trust of a notably Jesse Singal-hostile user base that are by no means already so locked into Bluesky that they can't simply leave again.
While I fully grant this is a terrible position to be in, I think Bluesky should ban Singal anyway.
Yes, users can simply block Jesse Singal - and indeed, he's now the most-blocked account on Bluesky. But we can presume that many Bluesky users who might become Singal's next target for harassment aren't currently aware that he's on the website at all, or are even aware who he is.
Unlike most other garden-variety bigoted assholes (who can indeed be pretty well neutralized by blocking en-masse), Singal has a major media platform, 100,000+ weirdo jerk followers on other social media websites, and a proven history of evading blocks and sneakily attempting to invoke hate mobs on others.
By definition, people like Singal aren't capable of simply having horrible opinions with their other horrible friends on their own horrible corner of Bluesky: they're both personally and professionally inclined to go out hunting for targets. Which means creeps of his ilk present a danger to the broader community that can't be solved by blocklists alone.
Yes, I'm aware that banning Jesse Singal is largely a symbolic move. Bluesky is inherently a public website, and it's possible for Singal and his ilk to access the posts of banned users by other mechanisms, even if he's banned. But banning a known bad actor is an extremely important symbolic move at this critical point in Bluesky's still very nascent development. It symbolizes who Bluesky is in allegiance with.
Meanwhile, letting Singal get away with violating Bluesky's terms of service in fear of him coming back with bigger, meaner friends is, in my opinion, just kicking the can down the road.
In the near future, Bluesky will likely end up banning other shitlords who violate the Community Guidelines. Sooner or later, one of those shitlords will manage to attract the eager and deep-pocketed ear of Elon Musk, or someone like him. In our asshole-haunted world, this feels as inevitable as the tides.
If Musk and MAGA World is truly determined to target Bluesky with lawsuits and hate mobs for the crime of letting its users avoid being bombarded with hate speech, then they're going to do it eventually, regardless of the current status of Singal's account.
And at this point in history, I believe that Bluesky will benefit a hell of a lot more from drawing a clear line in the sand about its values.
There is a vast global market of nice people on the Internet who are utterly sick and tired of watching hateful right-wing accounts successfully work the refs on social media websites in such a way that they can continue harassing vulnerable users.
And while many of these nice Internet users may not be getting harassed themselves, they know that the presence of the aforementioned predatory assholes generally ruins the climate and tone of online communities for everybody else. Which is evident to everyone who's had the misfortune of looking at Twitter in the last year.
From a purely self-interested, business-focused perspective, I think Bluesky would be better off catering to that audience of people who are sick of assholes and who are sick of watching assholes experience no consequences. And I think that taking a hard stand against assholes will be a lot more likely to convince that large and grossly under-served audience to pay Bluesky for things like subscriptions and domain verification services.
Seriously, Bluesky, please make the right call on this.
I can't go back to Mastodon.
I can't write that many content warning labels for Walter Benjamin memes with butts in them.
Going to Vietnam
I'm flying to Hanoi at an ungodly hour on Monday, where I'll be spending Christmas and New Year's with my parents.
I've been to Vietnam a few times before, but it's been over a decade since I was last there, and I never got further north than Hue and Hoi An. This time, we'll be spending a few weeks in Hanoi, then heading down towards Da Nang, Hue, and Saigon (per current plans, anyway).
I'll try to post as much as possible, both on Bluesky and on here, about what we do and what we eat. Probably mostly about what we eat, because Vietnamese food is some of my favorite in the world and I'm very excited about it.
Please share your Vietnam travel suggestions with me in the comments or on Bluesky!
My Spicy Butternut Squash Soup Recipe: It's Winter Now But Whatever
It was already December when I realized to my shock and horror that I had not yet consumed a single bowl of seasonally-appropriate butternut squash soup.
After poking around on a number of recipe websites, I came up with the following procedure. This produces a satisfyingly spicy and nutrient-rich soup. Feel free to omit the sausage if you want to keep it vegetarian, and use coconut milk if you want to make it vegan.
I think I'll make this soup with coconut milk instead of cream next time, as I think it'd actually be tastier in combination with the heavy chile pepper influence in this soup. Maybe I'll add a splash of fresh lime juice, too.
The spicier elements (sambal olek and rehydrated chile peppers) can also be reduced or omitted if you're not fond of chile peppers.
INGREDIENTS
2 chopped and washed Leeks/garlic leeks
1 peeled carrot, cut into chunks
1 peeled and chopped apple
3 peeled cloves of garlic
2 or 3 dried and rehydrated ancho chile peppers
Whole butternut squash (peeled and cut into chunks)
Sambal olek to taste
Cup of heavy cream or coconut milk
1 cup of tomato puree (I use San Marzano)
Tablespoon of tomato paste
5 or 6 fresh sage leaves
32 oz/1 cardboard container of chicken or vegetable stock
1 lb Italian hot sausage
Teaspoon or more of smoked paprika
Teaspoon of MSG (if you want, but I suggest it)
Salt to taste
Pepper to taste
PROCESS
Roast butternut squash, garlic cloves, and carrots at 425 until soft - about 25 to 30 minutes.
While the vegetables are roasting, cook crumbled sausage in large pot. When the sausage is brown and crispy, remove with slotted spoon. Retain some pork fat (within reason) in pot.
Add olive oil to pot. On medium high, briefly fry sambal olek, tomato paste, and chopped reconstituted ancho chile peppers. Add chopped garlic cloves, leeks and apple, and continue to cook.
After about five minutes (or after leeks and apples have softened), add chopped carrots and squash. Stir fry this with other vegetables for a few minutes, being careful not to burn them.
Add tomato puree and briefly saute.
Add chicken stock to desired consistency (and augment with water).
Add pinch of MSG, smoked paprika, and salt and pepper. Add chopped fresh sage.
Bring mixture to boil, then reduce heat to low. Simmer for 30 minutes, or until all vegetables are soft and flavors meld.
Puree soup in batches in food processor or blender.
Return pureed soup to pot. Put on medium-high heat.
Add cooked sausage to soup. Cook for about 5 minutes to meld flavors.
Add washed and chopped kale to soup. Cook for about four minutes or until soft.
Reduce heat to medium. Add half a cup of heavy cream or coconut milk, and stir.
Cook for two minutes, then turn off heat.
Serve your soup.
For toppings, some ideas:
Crème fraiche.
Fresh ricotta.
Crispy fried sage leaves - just shallow fry in a saute pan for a minute or so.
Crispy fried jalapeno slices.
Chili crisp.
Fresh spinach or arugula (stirred in right as soup is served).
Flavor Blasted Pizza Goldfish (shockingly good pairing, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it).
Kimchi (also works shockingly well).
El Yucateco Black habanero hot sauce.
