Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky takes on Twitter

This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: ‘Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky takes on Twitter’

Sonja Hutson
Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Wednesday, May 10th, and this is your FT News Briefing.

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Donald Trump has been found liable for sexual abuse of a journalist. Ireland is swimming in tax revenues, and it has a plan for what to do with it all. And we’ll talk about one of the new social media sites that emerged since Elon Musk took over Twitter.

Hannah Murphy
Right now, Bluesky’s main offer is that it is not Twitter.

Sonja Hutson
I’m Sonja Hutson, in for Marc Filippino, and here’s the news you need to start your day.

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A jury handed down a ruling yesterday in one of the several legal challenges facing former US president Donald Trump. Trump was cleared of a rape allegation in a civil lawsuit brought by the writer and TV personality E Jean Carroll. The jury did find Trump liable in a separate claim of sexual abuse of a journalist. Jurors ordered Trump to pay Carroll $5mn in damages. Trump is currently campaigning to become the Republican nominee for president, and recent polling shows that he’s still overwhelmingly popular among rightwing voters.

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Ireland has what one economist calls an embarrassment of riches. The government is awash in corporate tax revenues, thanks to all the global tech and pharmaceutical firms that have headquarters there. So what does a government do with all that money? Well, it plans to set up a sovereign wealth fund to invest it. Here’s the FT’s Ireland correspondent Jude Webber.

Jude Webber
So I think it is very significant that Ireland is saying, well, we’ll take this money, but we’ll put it on one side, we’ll try to maximise it, and then we’ll have money to use in the future. Sometimes Ireland’s been a bit more spendthrift in past decades and has suffered financial shocks and crises. So this is an attempt to really factor in the long term.

Sonja Hutson
So what might Ireland’s government spend the money on? Where’s the biggest need?

Jude Webber
Well, the biggest need at the moment is housing. Ireland has a massive housing problem. It’s not building enough social housing. And even though it is now accelerating the delivery of social housing, which is cheap housing for people on low incomes, there just isn’t enough. But the government already has a housing programme, and I think they’re quite wary of using all of these bumper revenues for that kind of things. You know, a lot of people there are critics who say housing in all of these rainy day funds, you know, it’s raining now. There’s a massive housing crisis and the money should be used for now. But the government doesn’t seem to want to use it for any sort of short-term thing. They want to, sort of, keeps them in reserve because, obviously, like many other countries, Ireland has an ageing population. There could be infrastructure projects far into the future. So they want to keep these the sort of long-term structural plans.

Sonja Hutson
Jude Webber is the FT’s Ireland correspondent.

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The European Union is considering sanctions on eight Chinese businesses. It’s accusing them of selling equipment to Russia that could be used in weapons. China has vowed to defend its businesses if the EU goes ahead with the proposal. EU officials are discussing it this week. China’s foreign minister said China did not deliver any weapons into crisis regions.

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If you’re not so into Twitter these days, you’ve got lots of other options. Mastodon, Hive Social, Notes, Spill — the list goes on and on. Today we’re going to talk about a new one called Bluesky. And it’s notable because it was started by one of the guys who started Twitter itself, Jack Dorsey. To find out more about Bluesky, I’m joined by the FT’s Hannah Murphy. Hi, Hannah.

Hannah Murphy
Hi there. Hi.

Sonja Hutson
So from what I understand, Bluesky is still invite-only, very exclusive. Did you get an invite?

Hannah Murphy
I did manage to get an invite by, by pure coincidence. Actually, several people have offered me one now, but . . .  

Sonja Hutson
Oh, ‘cause you’re so popular. OK . . .  

Hannah Murphy
Well, this is what happens when you’re working on, writing Twitter stories and speaking to former Twitter staffers, some of whom are sort of involved in Bluesky on an informal basis.

Sonja Hutson
So what is Bluesky like for the user? I hear it’s really similar to Twitter.

Hannah Murphy
So the user experience is essentially very, very much like Twitter but with, currently with less functionality. So you can’t direct message people, for example. But the layout is that feed you’ll recognise, and you can post and repost. And Bluesky’s come up with its own lexicon for that. So a tweet is called a “skeet”, a portmanteau of “sky” and “tweet”. 

Sonja Hutson
Why would someone jump ship from Twitter? What’s the appeal? What does Bluesky offer them?

Hannah Murphy
Right now, Bluesky’s main offer is that it is not Twitter. It’s also got that sort of exclusivity given the invite codes and this real feeling, kind of mischievous, collegiate feeling on the platform because it’s very new. People sort of sharing memes about the platform itself.

Sonja Hutson
OK, so Bluesky is a decentralised social media platform. Can you explain what that actually means?

Hannah Murphy
So the idea that Jack had while he was CEO of Twitter in 2019 was to also build the sort of protocol or standard upon which other social media platforms and other developers could build more tailored offerings. And these could all coexist in one sort of interoperable system where there’s no central authority and control. The idea behind this was there was very complex debates about how platforms should be moderated. And fingers were pointing at CEOs of platforms like Mark Zuckerberg, like Jack Dorsey, saying, you’re censoring us if they decide to police in a certain way, or you’re not censoring enough. So this way he’s saying, well, you know what? You pick your experience. There’ll be lots of competing building going on on this one protocol, and it’s down to the user to decide what they want.

Sonja Hutson
So is it essentially self-moderation then?

Hannah Murphy
For now, they are doing some human moderation is my understanding. But eventually the aspiration is to be that choose-your-own-adventure model where if you don’t want to see certain sorts of content, you can sort of put various filters on and currently that you can click on things like nudity, sexually suggestive, violent content, political hate groups, and you can click on whether to hide, to warn you about this content or to show this content. And so it’s the ideal for them is to move towards that on a sort of bigger basis where you’re really curating your own experience.

Sonja Hutson
Hannah Murphy is a technology correspondent for the FT. Thanks, Hannah.

Hannah Murphy
Thanks.

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Sonja Hutson
You can read more on all these stories at FT.com. This has been your daily FT News Briefing. Make sure you check back tomorrow for the latest business news.