This week, a series of migrations has added buzz to BlueSky. On Tuesday, the app passed  20 million mark — adding a million accounts in a day — an

Too Simple, Sometimes Naive

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2024-11-27 03:00:08

This week, a series of migrations has added buzz to BlueSky. On Tuesday, the app passed 20 million mark — adding a million accounts in a day — and overtook Threads worldwide for the number of active daily users.

For Chinese state media, the rise couldn’t have come at a worse time. They have sunk considerable resources into Twitter, via unlabeled state-sponsored influencers, huge bot networks, the famous 50 cent army, offline police harassment of users, and cultivating the platform’s owner Elon Musk.

However, with BlueSky looking likely to emerge past Threads, Mastodon, and Substack notes as the X-scape of choice, already, there is worried chatter within Chinese state media circles as to how to address the problem.

Untested commercially, and attuned to disseminating information to a largely captured audience, state media outlets floundered when they hit the wilds of the world wide web.

To help, bosses tried tipping the scales. Crude techniques like massive ad buys via promoted posts, bot networks, and PR companies were used by state media editors to bolster their views.

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