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Vice President JD Vance joined Bluesky this week and hatefully trolled trans people — he immediately became the most-blocked account on the site.
Bluesky has been a refuge for trans and other marginalized groups escaping the right-wing echo chamber X has become since Elon Musk bought the former Twitter site four years ago. Not content to bask in that platform’s self-reenforcing snark, Vance brought it to Bluesky.
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“Hello Bluesky, I’ve been told this app has become the place to go for common sense political discussion and analysis. So I’m thrilled to be here to engage with all of you,” Vance wrote in his first post on the platform.
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He went on to quote Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurrence in the court’s decision this week to okay Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for trans minors.
The ban makes exceptions for cisgender children receiving the same care as trans youth. The court didn’t buy the plaintiffs’ argument that such bans violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law, regardless of one’s sex at birth.
“What do you think?” Vance asked, practically begging to be smacked down.
His wish came true.
Hello Bluesky, I've been told this app has become the place to go for common sense political discussion and analysis. So I'm thrilled to be here to engage with all of you.
— JD Vance (@jd-vance-1.bsky.social) 2025-06-18T20:49:56.916Z
Vance became the site’s most blocked user in its four-year history, with over 110,400 blocks in just a matter of days, according to Clearsky, which monitors social media activity.
Vance has been blocked by upwards of 50,000 people in the last 24 hours alone. That’s over 12 times more blocks than the site’s second-most blocked account in the past day. And that account is Vance’s official government feed.
The vice president earned just 10,000 followers over his first two days on the platform.
Users were unsparing in their contempt for Trump’s number two before hitting the block button.
“In order to have a debate, people need to take you seriously,” one user told him. “Now go back to your ‘yes man’ platform and whine about how dems are hypocritical because they don’t give you a chance. You don’t deserve a chance. You deserve karma. So let’s bully the bully.”
“How did the ‘PEREDE’ go?” one user trolled Vance while referencing the measly turnout for Trump’s military parade timed for his own birthday.
Said another, “You and Trump and the rest of the clown car Cabinet in action and words have proven to be immoral, incompetent criminal, lying, despicable humans.”
Vance’s post is just another example of how he and the rest of the MAGA “manosphere” are so intent, and effective, at stirring up hate.
Vance announced his Bluesky raid on X, where supporters were thumbs up on his effort to do “a little trolling.”
On Bluesky, one chill user asked, “Dude, wtf are you even doing here?”
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Our shitty autocrats are nothing if not predictable.
As we just got done noting, the Trump administration and their right wing extremist billionaire friend have joined forces to wage war on Netflix’s attempted acquisition of Warner Brothers. Larry wants Warner Brothers (and CNN) as part of his obvious effort to build a new autocrat-friendly propaganda empire, and Trump has continually signaled his attempt to help him derail the Netflix deal.
Enter FCC boss Brendan Carr, who, right on cue, started popping up in the press to suddenly pretend he cares about competition. Carr did an interview with Bloomberg last week in which he proclaimed that Netflix’s acquisition of Warner Brothers would be terribly uncompetitive:
“What you’ve seen Netflix do as a general matter, in terms of their organic growth, is fantastic,” the FCC chair said. “There are legitimate competition concerns that I’ve seen raised about their acquisition here and just the sheer amount of scale and consolidation you can see in the streaming market.”
Carr goes on to state he sees no competition with Larry Ellison, one of the wealthiest men on the planet and a key Trump donor and ally, hoovering up the entirety of new and old media.
So, a few things.
One, Carr’s FCC has absolutely zero authority over this transaction because it doesn’t involve any of the companies he actually regulates or the transfer of any broadcast licenses. Two, Carr has an absolutely abysmal record on competition issues, having rubber stamped no limit of harmful consolidation in telecom and, more recently, local broadcast media.
It would take a journalist covering Carr’s comments all of fifteen minutes to find a long, long list of examples where Carr rubber stamped a terrible merger and ignored literally all labor, competition, and market harms. He’s genuinely the last person anybody should be asking for their thoughts on market competition, but you’re going to be seeing a lot of him in the months to come.
It’s also worth noting that of the available paths forward from this point, a Netflix acquisition of Warner Brothers is probably the best of a bunch of bad options. Ideally you’d block all new consolidation in media, but that’s not happening with Trump’s disemboweled and captured regulators. As such, a Netflix acquisition is a better option than letting Larry Ellison create a right wing agitprop empire on the back of CNN, TikTok, and CBS.
Quick refresher: Warner Brothers rejected Ellison’s higher $108 billion offer for Netflix, citing Saudi money involvement and dodgy financial math as something that might make approval more difficult. When that failed, Ellison attempted a hostile takeover attempt with the help of the president’s son in law and the Saudis. When that didn’t work, Ellison tried to sue Warner Brothers.
When that didn’t work, Ellison and friends shifted their attention to trying to smear the “woke” Netflix deal in the media. Enter Carr, who is a useful idiot Trump and Ellison can use to prop the DOJ’s inevitable scuttling of the Netflix deal as a matter of serious policy in the defense of the public interest, before offloading Warner Brothers (and CNN, and HBO) to one of Trump’s top right wing billionaire donors.
Trumpism has long tried to pretend that it cares about populist antitrust reform and reining in corporate power, but it’s always been a lie propped up by a broad variety of useful idiots; some of whom are purported experts on the subject (see: Matt Stoller), and many of which are major corporate media institutions whose journalism has been eroded by the relentless pursuit of consolidation.
Neither Variety, nor Bloomberg, for example, can be bothered to mention Carr’s decade-long history of rubber stamping harmful consolidation across media and telecom. Kind of important if you’re going to profile a major government figure’s thoughts on competition, yes?
I’d be prepared for a fake Trump DOJ antitrust inquiry in the coming months, designed to transfer ownership of Warner Brothers to Larry Ellison and Skydance/CBS. Propped up, in turn, by the usual assortment of bad faith bullshitters pretending this is a public interest effort. Should that fail, Trump’s investing in Netflix and Warner Brothers so he’s certain to come out on top either way.
In all outcome the public, markets, and labor likely lose due to consolidation. But some of the paths are less harmful to the public interest, and democracy itself, than others.
Njalla is the name for a traditional Sámi hut, specifically designed to function as a safe storage location, keeping food away from bears and other predators.
On the web, the Njalla name was adopted by a privacy-focused domain name service that helps to shield website operators from external threats, including takedown efforts and foreign court orders.
Earlier this month, this feature of Njalla was brought to the fore again in the lawsuit Spotify and several record labels filed against Anna’s Archive. Fearing the publication of millions of scraped tracks, the music companies obtained a preliminary injunction to shut off the archive’s domain names.
The case was filed under seal to prevent tipping off Anna’s Archive. This partially worked, as the suspension of the .ORG and .SE domain names came as a surprise. However, Anna’s Archive was certainly not planning to throw in the towel.
After the federal court in New York issued an ex parte temporary restraining order on January 2, the .ORG registry suspended the official annas-archive.org domain. Around the same time, Cloudflare also complied with the court order, disabling the nameservers for the targeted domains, including annas-archive.li.
While these actions rendered several of Anna’s Archive unreachable, the .LI variant soon became accessible again. Instead of relying on Cloudflare’s nameservers, it switched to Njalla. The same also applies to the .PM and .IN domains, which were registered as a backup.
Spotify and the labels also noticed this switch to Njalla and, while the case was still under seal, they applied for a broad preliminary injunction to cover the new domains. This also included Njalla as a targeted intermediary, alongside hosting services, domain registrars, and registries.
This injunction, signed by U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff on January 16, does not only cover existing domain names but also any domain names that will be registered in the future.
To get an idea of how these domains and services are connected, TorrentFreak compiled the following non-exhaustive and unverified overview. This also includes the new .in domain that was suspended by the National Internet Exchange of India.
| Domain Name | Registry | Registrar | Proxy / DNS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Public Interest Registry (PIR) | Tucows Domains Inc. | Unknown | |
| annas-archive.li | Switch Foundation | Immaterialism Ltd. | Njalla |
| The Swedish Internet Foundation | Hosting Concepts B.V. (Registrar.eu) | Cloudflare Inc. | |
| National Internet Exchange of India | Tucows Domains Inc. | Njalla; IQWeb FZ-LLC (DDoS-Guard) | |
| annas-archive.pm | Registry of record | Hosting Concepts B.V. (Openprovider) | Njalla; IQWeb FZ-LLC (DDoS-Guard) |
The U.S. court order spurred American organizations into action (.ORG registry and Cloudflare) and also helped to get the .IN domain offline. However, not all intermediaries were eager to respond. In fact, the .PM and .LI versions remain accessible today.
While none of the intermediaries would encourage piracy, it appears that they don’t automatically comply with foreign court orders either. Njalla, for example, is operated by Njalla.srl, which is based in Costa Rica, may require a local court order to take action.
We don’t know for certain that the music companies sent the injunction to all named intermediaries involved, but given the gravity of their concerns, that would make sense.
To get more clarity, we asked Njalla for a comment on the situation, but due to privacy issues, it could not share any further information at this stage. The company did note that, generally speaking, it’s not against sharing culture.
“Since we are privacy focused people it is not possible for us to comment on this. However, we can say that we in general think the world becomes a better place when people share what they have with each other, be it food, water, money or culture.”
We also contacted the Switzerland-based Switch Foundation, which is the registry for the .LI domain, but did not receive a reply. Spotify, which previously responded to our inquiries, has also stopped responding.
The AFNIC registry did respond to our request for clarification. The company is not mentioned in the injunction directly, but as the ‘registry of record’ for the .PM domain name, it should be covered.
AFNIC informs us that they have not received a request to comply with the injunction, nor have they been informed about the court order. However, even if it were to receive the U.S. injunction, AFNIC clarified that it would not comply.
“Decisions from U.S. courts are not directly applicable to Afnic regarding actions concerning .fr domain names or the French overseas extensions under its jurisdiction. To be enforceable, a foreign decision must be recognized by the French court,” an Afnic spokesperson informed us.
This effectively means that the plaintiffs must hire French counsel and petition a French court to recognize the U.S. judgment under Article 509 of the French Civil Code.
Whether Spotify and the music companies plan to go through this trouble is unknown. Anna’s Archive, meanwhile, has disabled the Spotify torrent downloads until further notice, which may have defused the situation somewhat.
That said, thus far the music industry’s enforcement efforts show that the reach of U.S. courts has its limitations. While it is possible to expand the scope through mutual legal assistance requests in foreign courts, these have yet to surface.
At this stage, the music industry doesn’t appear to know who is behind the site. The RIAA previously discovered that “Cyberdyne S.A.” was the registrant for the .se domain. However, that trace doesn’t appear to lead anywhere either.
“‘Cyberdyne’ is also the name of the fictional technology company in the ‘Terminator’ movie series behind the ‘Skynet’ artificial intelligence network that achieved super intelligence and self-awareness, leading to nuclear devastation,” RIAA’s content protection chief informed the court, noting that this may be a fabricated name.
—
Copies of the various unsealed court documents referenced in this article are available below.
– Temporary Restraining Order (TRO)
– Declaration of Mark McDevitt (RIAA)
– Reply memorandum requesting to expand the injunction
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
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