Bluesky COO warns social media bans risk cementing big tech's power

Bluesky supports protecting young people online. What its chief operating officer fears is that the regulation designed to do that could end up handing permanent dominance to the very platforms it is meant to hold accountable and quietly closing the door on every alternative.

Speaking to CNBC at SXSW London on Wednesday, Bluesky COO Rose Wang laid out the concern plainly. As governments push for heavier regulation of social media, the compliance burden falls equally on a 40-person company like Bluesky and on Meta, which employs thousands of trust and safety staff.

"Essentially what I'm scared of is in the long term, we're headed to a world where there's about three to five platforms, and extreme heavy regulation of those platforms, and basically the whole compliance teams of these platforms are 10 times the size of our entire team," Wang said.

The result, she argued, would be "almost impossible" conditions for smaller entrants trying to build healthier spaces online.

However, Bluesky implemented age verification measures to ensure that those below the age of 16 would be prevented from accessing its platform due to Australia being the first nation to ban social media apps and the implementation of such a ban starting December of last year.

The fines for failure to implement measures to ensure compliance could go up to 49.5 million Australian dollars.

Wang acknowledged that the behaviour of dominant platforms has made government intervention inevitable. "These platforms have led to a place where the bottom line is the thing that drives what they do... I understand why governments have to step in and regulate, because the platforms have done nothing right," she said.

However, she believed that a more nuanced approach was needed, where direct communication between regulators and small and medium participants is complemented by tough law enforcement aimed at large platforms that have already been found to violate current regulations.

In her view, the two problems need different approaches, and mixing them results in ineffective policies for both the user and competition.