In case you missed it: a bunch of people on Bluesky posted about the recent assassination / murder of a prominent right-wing American figure with a statement which in Latin* would be “requiescat in urina” — and then they had their posts blocked:

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"rest in piss"-gate has turned into a moderation nightmare for bluesky, which nonetheless refuses to explain its underlying rationale even as (or perhaps because) it seems to be changing in real time. after my own suspension, I spoke to dozens of people who got in trouble for using the same phrase

— Nathan Grayson (@nathangrayson.bsky.social) 2025-09-12T18:44:19.886Z

Truthfully: this sounds like the behaviour of a text classifier which — working from a small training set of postings made by challenging individuals — decided to go do a mass-takedown of offending content.

Colloquially: “a bot worked out that some words were ‘bad’ and took down everything containing them.”

Between this and the recent deployments of age verification in the USA and in the UK, I am wondering if Bluesky’s circumstances are so desperate to not run foul of Government attention / regulation / fines, that it’s taken to proactive and deep compliance in the knowledge that “the nerds will be okay, they can just run up another PDS or implement client haxx and thereby circumvent the controls.“

That’s not a healthy way to approach bad regulation.

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[*] translated to confuse image text classifiers, just in case they’re still being zealous