Bluesky‘s chief operating officer maintains that not all hope is lost on social media.
Rose Wang was hosted by SXSW London at a fireside chat with journalist Amit Katwala on Monday afternoon, where the platform’s chief operating officer covered a vast range of topics, including how Bluesky has accrued over 44 million users in two years, the value of community-led connection, and why Facebook and X have gone wildly wrong. The session was titled “Whose Social Network Is It, Anyway?”
The executive, who said Bluesky is currently just a company of 40 staffers, began by saying social media is “controlled by a few corporations.”
“They control what information is in front of you and what they send your way. In short, they control speech all over the world, and we’ve seen the consequences of this,” she said. Wang and Katwala did not mention Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg or X’s Elon Musk by name, but they were referring to the latter platform using its pre-Musk name, Twitter.
Bluesky’s sudden burst of growth — many of them joining from X in the wake of the 2024 election, during which Musk was accused of influencing the outcome through the platform — also came because “we saw what current social media structures are like [when] one person controls the entire platform,” said Wang.
