Bluesky‘s chief operating officer maintains that not all hope is lost on social media.
Rose Wang was hosted by SXSW London at a fireside chat with journalist Amit Katwala on Monday afternoon, where the platform’s chief operating officer covered a vast range of topics, including how Bluesky has accrued over 44 million users in two years, the value of community-led connection, and why Facebook and X have gone wildly wrong. The session was titled “Whose Social Network Is It, Anyway?”
The executive, who said Bluesky is currently just a company of 40 staffers, began by saying social media is “controlled by a few corporations.”
“They control what information is in front of you and what they send your way. In short, they control speech all over the world, and we’ve seen the consequences of this,” she said. Wang and Katwala did not mention Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg or X’s Elon Musk by name, but they were referring to the latter platform using its pre-Musk name, Twitter.
Bluesky’s sudden burst of growth — many of them joining from X in the wake of the 2024 election, during which Musk was accused of influencing the outcome through the platform — also came because “we saw what current social media structures are like [when] one person controls the entire platform,” said Wang.
“When you have a new owner that comes in, they can change the culture and the rules of that platform overnight and make it inhospitable to many people,” Wang continued, a veiled reference to Musk’s purchase of X in 2022. “What happened with Bluesky is the growth came from, yes, people call it ‘lefties.’ We have to look deep into, well, who are these lefties? [They’re] journalists, scientists [and] people who want to rely on actual verified information. They fled because none of that was really available anymore.” Bluesky, she added, wants to give power back to social media users: “So they can go and figure out what rules they need for their own feed, [so] that they can only build their own feed, that if we didn’t like a piece of content, we can’t take it away.”
“They need to be able to determine what information is out there and what information they want to take away from their own communities, rather than relying on billionaires to make that decision.”
Over the course of the last few years, since Bluesky’s public launch in February 2024, Wang and her colleagues have noticed “that there’s a hunger in the world from people [who want] to know what’s actually true, what’s actually human, what’s actually created by creators and not other AI agents.”
As a platform still in its infancy, Bluesky still has the ability to adapt quickly to the rising needs of its users, she continued. “Facebook and Twitter are huge, and they have tons of users, so for them to turn the shift is really difficult. Also, they’re basically AI companies at this point.”
Wang’s business is keen to rebuild the relationship between content creator and the person viewing the content, as well as communities, fandoms and other small groups that social media has, historically, united.
Among other topics covered by Wang and Katwala at SXSW London — taking place across Shoreditch from June 1-6 — was rethinking the lucrative advertising model so that the money is invested back into the community, and not simply used to manufacture attention, as well as AI. Because, of course.
“AI is in every conversation, and I think it’s really important because in some ways,” Wang said. “People compare it to electricity, right? It’s the thing that powers everything else, and I think it’s really important for us to talk about AI in a more nuanced way, rather than this general bucket of ‘artificial intelligence. ‘ And right now, people are using AI to create content, and then they’re also using it to build apps. So, I think it’s really important for me to say that Bluesky, the company, we actually very much believe that AI is not that interesting in terms of being used to create content, but we think it’s really interesting in terms of leveling the playing field for builders.”
Bluesky’s newly-launched AI tool, Attie, is designed to help users curate their custom, personalized feeds according to their own interests — again, to help drive the community-first ethos Bluesky is so proud of.
Wang conceded that AI is a very useful moderating tool, which prompted Katwala to ask about Bluesky’s approach to moderation in an age where much of social media feels pretty lawless in that regard. “On social media platforms today, I think of moderation as basically court systems, right? They’re adjudicating what person or content can be on the platform, and the way they currently work is there’s one court system on every platform with one set of rules governing an entire world audience, and they have like 10,000 clerks who go make those decisions. I think that’s a very broken model,” she said.
SXSW London runs through Saturday.
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