How To Flex on LinkedIn (Part 4) - BlueSky Commissar Aaron Rodericks
The Head of Trust and Safety at Bluesky reaches record levels of demoralization on his LinkedIn and in a recent interview
Comrades: Bluesky is for Blueanon.
Bluesky is the cesspool where tolerant leftists shriek for violence with impunity. Like the old Twitter regime, they will attack and ban anyone for saying there are two genders. Its user base grew 10x in 2024, but monthly growth plummeted from 189% in November to 10% in December. CEO Jay Graber is not capable of running this company and it will implode soon. Ironically, Jay’s mother grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution and named her daughter "Lantian" (蓝天); it means "blue sky" in Chinese, as a wish for her to have "boundless freedom". Now she hosts red guard struggle sessions against any dissidents. She should resign for not listing her pronouns.
Aaron Rodericks (he/him) is the Head of Trust and Safety at Bluesky. Like all good commissars, he has pronouns listed on his LinkedIn. In his profile picture and cover image, he is looking away from us dirty peasants - an obvious sign of narcissism. He flexes hard about his accomplishments with Orwellian demoralized doublespeak bingo.
Trust and Safety means censorship and struggle sessions. Content moderation, regulation, and compliance are his weapons to manage “misinformation”. Before Elon fired him from Twitter, he bragged about growing his team of censors while achieving a perfect 100 score in DEI and high marks for “psychological safety”. Most commissars like him want to eat their cake and have it too - conduct activism with a cushy private sector salary.
It gets worse. Twitter was his first private sector job. For the first decade of his career, he served as a propagandist for the Canadian government tracking “emerging threats”, coordinating with globalist five eyes stakeholders, opening the border.
Commissar Aaron humblebragged on LinkedIn about an interview in Prospect Magazine called “Bluesky: The ‘safe space’ of social media’. So stunning, so brave. Such unintentional levels of comedy deserve a spicy translation:
The social media platform Bluesky has had a good year, to put it mildly. Since launching in 2023 as an invite-only community, then opening to the public in February 2024, it has quickly amassed more than 25m users and counting
It still doesn’t have nearly as many as its former parent company turned putative rival, Elon Musk’s X (previously Twitter). Nonetheless, user numbers are continually growing, engagement is high, and the less quantifiable “vibe” is palpable, largely thanks to take-up among high-profile individuals and publishers since the US election.
The “vibe” of Bluesky is mentally ill Marxists baying for blood and revolution. “High-profile individuals” aka regime word salad regurgitators left Twitter because they hate free speech and have Trump/Elon derangement. It’s the MLS of social media - where former stars fade to irrelevance.
A significant portion of Bluesky’s users are emigrés from Musk’s platform, angry at perceived misinformation, extremism and bigotry, as well as bots and spam accounts. Since purchasing the platform in 2022, Musk has changed many of the platform’s curation and moderation policies, and laid off many of the employees responsible for those issues.
One such employee was Aaron Rodericks. He previously co-led Twitter’s trust and safety team. One task he undertook was “hunting down nation-state actors that were manipulating elections”, he tells me. “Twitter in 2018 found out the hard way that Russian employees of the Internet Research Agency were day in, day out, logging into their offices in St Petersburg and manipulating the US election by pretending to be Americans.”
Bluesky BlueAnons will forever hate Elon for restoring free speech and ideological diversity. They never define what misinformation, extremism, and bigotry are. It’s always Russia’s fault.
In August 2023, as Musk was restructuring the company, Rodericks posted on LinkedIn that his team at X was hiring more staff with a “passion for protecting the integrity of elections and civic events”. Enraged right-wingers soon found the post. Former Trump administration official Mike Benz claimed Aaron was assembling a “censorship squad”. Rodericks later lost his job at X, with Musk tweeting, “The ‘Election Integrity’ Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone.”
Now, mirroring the defection journey some of X’s users have taken, Rodericks has moved across to Bluesky, working as its head of trust and safety since February 2024. The fledgling startup comprises just 20 full-time staff—that’s over a million users per employee.
Well done, Mike Benz. Unsurprisingly, the staff is left coast and Demoralized DIEvy League. The CEO went to UPenn and the COO went to Harvard.
Speaking via video call, Rodericks appears excited but also daunted—keeping the new platform relatively free of misinformation and harmful content, when many users have flocked there specifically for that promise, is a mammoth task for a small team grappling with exponential growth.
The Bluesky community has, so far, made the job easier. “To be honest, the user base was not prone to misinformation,” he says.
Nonetheless, Rodericks and the Bluesky team have introduced various policies, including a default labelling of content that is considered incorrect, harmful or intolerant. Other controversial moderation features include the “nuclear block” function (which removes any interaction you’ve had with the blocked user), the ability to mute posts which contain particular words and tags and “mute lists” (lists which users can create, share and subscribe to, to mute various users at once).
For Rodericks, such technical solutions have grand philosophical implications. “I think it just comes down to philosophies of free speech,” he says. “The last couple of years have seen a paradigm switch into a ‘one size fits all’ approach that’s dictated to you by billionaires… [based on] the type of speech that the owner of the company believes in, and it is a take-it-or-leave-it scenario.”
“We are trying to take a different philosophical approach at Bluesky, which means you should have the ability to freely express yourself, but others should also have the ability to freely not listen to you.”
Rodericks’s conception of free speech is influenced by his background. “Being Canadian shapes a lot of my perspective. There’s enough of the American perspective in the world on a day-to-day basis. For example, in the Canadian constitution… you have rights and freedoms, but they’re not unequivocal.”
This is why America is far superior to Canada. What is the point of rights and freedoms if they aren’t unequivocal? Canada should be subjugated as a territory with no voting rights, it is unworthy of being the 51st state.
Some have criticised Bluesky for being an “echo chamber” or “safe space”, too dominated by left-leaning and liberal users whose views are rarely challenged. “I’m glad that [critics] consider it a safe space,” Aaron says, “and ideally it can be a safe space for them as well. The whole point of Bluesky is for it to be safe and welcoming to all users. I think the issue is some people are defining their identity by opposition to others and how well they can harass others and deny their existence. Bluesky may not be the right place for them.”
“I think what I learned from my experience at Twitter under previous leadership is that a number of users appreciate a safe and welcoming environment,” he adds. “Elon himself has other priorities. He believes in free speech absolutism… I think it’s a notable and worthwhile experiment, if that’s where he wants to spend his money and his resources. I just don’t believe in that philosophy for Bluesky.”
Bluesky leftists are making death threats and doxxing people who say there are two genders. That is the opposite of a safe space. Aaron and the entire Bluesky team will keep burying their heads in the sand as the inmates take over the asylum.
The ostrich is a far better logo for them:
The only free speech platforms that matter are quite the contrast in styles:
For more LinkedIn flexing and its demoralized founder / Epstein Island VIP guest Reid Hoffman:
It's something of a hobby of mine to comment on chirpy and progressive LinkedIn posts (about DEI or inclusion or non-profit funding) with dark (and realistic) rejoinders. If you don't have any specific career ambitions I highly recommend it. I don't think anyone has EVER replied to (or even acknowledged) by comments... but they definitely see them.
Recently some poor woman posted a long piece of advice about finding your center and work-life balance and not settling (typical feminist toxic positivity, applying a dating mindset to business) and I wrote something like: "I keep telling Rangoon rickshaw drivers and young Congolese cobalt miners this sort of thing... but they're just not getting it! It's probably because they never went to college... : ("
“LinkedIn is a spiritual abyss: the blandness, the saccharine nihilism, the happy banal HR sociopathy, and chirpy mewling optimism. It's the digital form of the American Psycho business card scene, with an updated progressive HR veneer, and way dumber dialogue.”-Dave Greenberg
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/substack-notes-88
Bluesky: for all those people who haven't read Orwell, or who read him but didn't comprehend.