Cole Allen Found a Safe Space for Left-Wing Extremism on Bluesky

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at the climate of hate on Bluesky, and we cover more media misses.

Bluesky’s Content Moderation Problem

In September 2024, alternative social media platform Bluesky had only 10 million users — just a sliver of the audience that Elon Musk’s X enjoys with its 388 million monthly active users.

By late last year, that number had grown exponentially, to nearly 44 million registered users. But despite the platform being touted as a “kinder, gentler” alternative to X, some users, like journalist Jesse Singal, quickly spotted a problem with the burgeoning social media site: The ideological conformity of its users meant that there were strikingly few reasonable people on the platform capable of checking the more extreme voices who had begun to excuse or even encourage political violence.

It perhaps comes as little surprise, then, that the alleged White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner shooter was apparently an active user of the app, having posted more than 1,000 times under the username “coldforce.”

In the lead up to Cole Tomas Allen’s attempted attack, which thankfully ended with Allen’s arrest and no serious injuries or death, the suspect took to Bluesky to warn his followers about the dire threat posed by the Trump administration.

He “signal boosted” posts on the platform arguing that President Trump should be “immediately removed from office and tried for high crimes” and criticizing a “Freedom of the Press” pocket square that many journalists donned at last night’s dinner as “a white flag that no one can read unless you pull it out and wave it in defeat,” according to the Washington Free Beacon, which reviewed his account before it was taken down over the weekend.

“the president of the united states is personally looting the treasury to the tune of literally billions of dollars and that he is not being immediately removed from office and tried for high crimes against this country is a devastating indictment of every part of our political system,” read a post that Allen shared one week before the WHCD.

He also reposted messages that called to “Abolish ICE” and that referred to an immigration processing facility as a “concentration camp.”

While the report does not indicate Allen shared any violent messages on Bluesky, his feed — and the platform in general — are rife with messages that cast the Trump administration and its supporters as an existential threat to the country that must be resisted by any means necessary. Take someone with the wrong kind of psychological predisposition and marinate him in that message long enough, and he may decide he has to take matters into his own hands.

A study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that online threats of violence against public officials in the U.S. increased more than threefold between 2021 and 2025, across platforms including not only Bluesky but X, Reddit, YouTube, and other forums. Republicans received 33 percent more violent threats than Democrats, according to the analysis, while 47 percent of all threatening content was targeted toward President Trump.

Journalist Jesse Singal warned back in December 2024 that Bluesky “has a death threat problem” in a column for the Free Press. It was at that time that Singal had recently made his first post on Bluesky, and quickly found the platform was an “exceptionally angry place.” He attributed the platform’s unwelcoming nature to its “widespread culture of impunity when it comes to violent threats among some of its users.”

“Bluesky has either made a conscious decision to take a laissez-faire attitude toward serious threats of violence, or its moderators are incapable of guarding against them, or both,” he wrote at the time.

Singal found himself on the receiving end of hate on the liberal-leaning platform thanks to his scrupulous reporting on youth gender medicine.

His arrival on the platform led to death threats and a Change.org petition that was signed by more than 25,000 people urging the site to shutter his account.

A user named @billkezos.bsky.social with 10,000 followers posted, “Jesse Singal. 2 to the chest. 1 to the forehead a little less than [an] inch above the nasal bridge.”

That user later posted an address that he believed to be associated with Singal. The post went viral, with users calling for people to show up to the address and hurt or kill the independent journalist.

Singal reported that he was unimpressed by Bluesky’s content moderation process, which briefly suspended the user behind the attempted doxxing and death threats, before ultimately allowing the account to be reinstated.

Bluesky’s community guidelines state: “We do not allow content that shows or promotes violence, harm, exploitation, or criminal activity against adults, children, or animals.” The platform further advises that users cannot “threaten others with death, serious harm, or express that others should be hurt or killed” nor “promote, glorify, or incite violence against individuals or groups.”

One of the darker days on the site, however, came when conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah.

Bluesky was forced to remind users that “glorifying violence” violates its guidelines as accounts celebrated Kirk’s death and called for similar violence against a number of right-wing figures, including Andy Ngo, Ben Shapiro, and Benny Johnson, as well as author and women’s rights activist J.K. Rowling.

Syracuse University geography and environment professor Farhana Sultana came under fire for her post on Bluesky about Kirk that read, “Sorry, but rest in piss.”

Left-wing columnist Karen Attiah said she was fired from the Washington Post over messages she shared on Bluesky in the wake of Kirk’s assassination.

“Part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence,” she wrote in one post.

Attiah had also shared a quote on Bluesky that she attributed to Kirk: “'Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot’- Charlie Kirk.”

However, that “quote” was a misleading rendering of remarks Kirk made on The Charlie Kirk Show in July 2023 about affirmative action, in which he was specifically talking about Joy Reid, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Michelle Obama, and Sheila Jackson Lee — not all black women.

Months later, Fox News reported that Bluesky had been “inundated” with posts by users calling for violence against ICE agents after the shooting of Renee Good.

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, who has more than 733,000 followers on Bluesky, has come under fire on several occasions for inflammatory rhetoric he has shared on the site.

In one instance, Bouie agreed with one of his followers that Vice President JD Vance’s mother was right to have attempted to sell him for drugs when he was a child.

“[T]his is a wicked man who knows he is being wicked and does it anyway,” Bouie wrote of Vance after the vice president declined to apologize to Alex Pretti’s family after Vance accused Pretti of showing up with “ill intent” to an immigration enforcement protest where he was ultimately fatally shot by immigration officers.

“[I] can’t imagine a parent who wouldn’t sell little JD for percocet if they knew he would turn out like this,” Bouie wrote.

Atlantic writer Thomas Chatterton Williams faced death threats from Bluesky users after Bouie criticized an Atlantic article he wrote about the “woke right.” While conservative activist Chris Rufo criticized the article for different reasons on X, Williams said the experiences of being criticized on X and Bluesky were “not equivalent.”

Williams says he found “far more good faith, graciousness, nuance, sense of fair play and diversity of thought” from Rufo’s followers on X than on Bluesky, where he found that “a total uniformity of opinion and malice defines the site.”

One Bluesky user urged Williams to “take a shotgun, make sure it is loaded, put the barrel in your mouth, and pull the trigger.”

Headline Fail of the Week

“The Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted for paying sources to infiltrate hate groups, a tactic federal agencies have used for decades,” reported USA Today.

“Not even close,” writes Becket Adams for NR. He explains:

. . . the SPLC reportedly paid about $270,000 to a source who “was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned” the rally, “attended the event at the direction of the SPLC,” “made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC,” and “helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.” It’s also worth noting that the SPLC allegedly continued to pay its Unite the Right source six years after the Charlottesville event.

In total, the federal indictment lists roughly $3 million in payouts, not just to the sources listed above, but also: a former “Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America,” a Klan member who was the spouse of “an Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan,” a person who “led the National Socialist Party of America” and “was the former director of a faction of the Aryan Nations,” and the “reported National President of American Front,” who was “a convicted federal felon for his participation in a cross burning.”

These aren’t low-level guys. They are in leadership roles, meaning the SPLC allegedly bankrolled high-ranking leaders in the hate groups it purports to oppose, keeping them financially afloat in the otherwise profitless profession of hating blacks, Jews, Catholics, and others.

And the informant paying scheme was “ingeniously lucrative,” Adams adds. In 2016, the year before the Unite the Right rally, the SPLC’s total contributions and public support stood at about $50 million. By October 2017, after the rally, revenues soared to approximately $133 million.

And yet, the mainstream media was determined to make the Trump DOJ’s investigation into the SPLC into a nothingburger.

“Justice Dept. Charges Prominent Civil Rights Group With Financial Crimes,” reported the New York Times.

And from CBS News: “Justice Department charges Southern Poverty Law Center with fraud over investigations into extremist groups, Blanche says.”

Media Misses

• MS NOW reporter Josh Einiger misled the network’s viewers about the alleged WHCD’s manifesto and likely motivations, claiming the writings were “described as anti-Trump in nature,” but “not aligned to one specific ideology.” He claimed he was “not entirely sure what that means in terms of a motive.” Yet Allen writes in the manifesto about the “rage” he experienced “thinking about everything this administration has done.”

• MS Now’s Chris Hayes had New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on his show for a town hall to mark the end of Mamdani’s first 100 days in office. The town hall, of course, had little in the way of substance. In fact, Hayes opened up the evening with this hard-hitting question: “You know, you were an assembly member, just like the last time, maybe the last time I saw you, actually, and just a few months ago. It’s a very different job than this job. What’s the biggest thing you've learned? The biggest realization you've had actually being in that position?”

Mamdani responded with a lengthy answer about filling in the city’s potholes. “We’ve also filled in 102,000 potholes in that same 100-day period. We started to repave more than a thousand miles of roadway. And all of this comes back from a belief that there’s no problem too big, no task too small. And we call this pothole politics.”