Comment by xoa

>For example, some rouge user starts posting offensive content about other users, on the brink of breaking the law. Let’s say these other users will mention it to labellers, who this time will refuse to take this content down.

Under US law, the user posting the content is the only one legally responsible for it. Someone hosting the content could be required to take it down by court order or other legal process (like under the DMCA SH provisions) if subject to US jurisdiction. Bluesky is, so they'd have a process same as anyone else in the US, and of course could make their own moderation decisions regardless on top. But the protocol allows 3rd parties to take on any role in the system technically (though certain infra roles sound like they'd be quite expensive to run as a practical matter), so they could be subject to different law. Foreign judgements are not enforceable in the US if they don't meet the same bar of the 1st Amendment a domestic one would have to.

Labellers from the description would never have any legal responsibility in the US, and they do not "take content down", they're only adding speech (meta information, their opinion on what applies to a given post) on top, best-effort. Clients and servers then can use the labels to decide what to show, or not.

At any rate "on the brink of breaking the law" would mean nothing, legally. And "offensive" is not a legal category either. Bluesky or anyone else would be free to take it down anyway, there is zero restriction on them doing whatever they want and on the contrary that itself is protected speech. But they would be equally free to not do so, and if someone believed it actually broke one of the very limited categories of restrictions on free speech and was worth the trouble they'd have to go to court over it.