Bluesky on Friday printed its moderation report for the previous yr, noting the sizable development the social community skilled in 2024 and the way that affected its Trust & Safety crew’s workload. It additionally famous that the biggest variety of reviews got here from customers reporting accounts or posts for harassment, trolling, or intolerance — a difficulty that’s plagued Bluesky because it’s grown, and has even led to wide-scale protests at occasions over particular person moderation selections.
The firm’s report didn’t tackle or clarify why it did or didn’t take motion on particular person customers, together with these on the most-blocked listing.
The firm added over 23 million customers in 2024, as Bluesky grew to become a brand new vacation spot for former Twitter/X customers for varied causes. Throughout the yr, the social community benefited from a number of modifications at X, together with its choice to vary how blocking works and prepare AI on consumer information. Other customers left X after the outcomes of the U.S. presidential election, based mostly on how X proprietor Elon Musk’s politics started to dominate the platform. The app additionally surged in customers whereas X was quickly banned in Brazil again in September.
To meet the calls for attributable to this development, Bluesky elevated its moderation crew to roughly 100 moderators, it mentioned, and is continuous to rent. The firm additionally started providing crew members psychological counseling to assist them with the troublesome job of being continuously uncovered to graphic content material. (An space we hope AI will sooner or later tackle, as people aren’t constructed to deal with the sort of work.)
In whole, there have been 6.48 million reviews to Bluesky’s moderation service, up 17x from 2023 when there have been solely 358,000 reviews.
Starting this yr, Bluesky will start to just accept moderation reviews instantly from its app. Similar to X, this can permit customers to trace actions and updates extra simply. Later, it can help appeals in-app, too.
When Brazilian customers flooded into Bluesky in August, the corporate was seeing as many as 50,000 reviews per day, on the peak. This led to a backlog in addressing moderation reviews and required Bluesky to rent extra Portuguese-language employees, together with by means of a contract vendor.
In addition, Bluesky started automating extra classes of reviews past simply spam to assist it tackle the inflow, although this generally led to false positives. Still, the automation helped drop the processing time to simply “seconds” for “high-certainty” accounts. Before automation, most reviews had been dealt with inside 40 minutes. Now, human moderators are stored within the loop to handle the false positives and appeals, if not all the time dealing with the preliminary choice.
Bluesky says that 4.57% of its lively customers (1.19 million) made not less than one moderation report in 2024, down from 5.6% in 2023. Most of those — 3.5 million reviews — had been for particular person posts. Account profiles had been reported 47,000 occasions, typically for a profile image or banner photograph. Lists had been reported 45,000 occasions; DMs had been reported 17,700 occasions, with feeds and Starter Packs receiving 5,300 and 1,900 reviews, respectively.
Most reviews had been over anti-social habits, like trolling and harassment — a sign from Bluesky customers that they wish to see a much less poisonous social community, as in contrast with X.
Other reviews had been for the next classes, Bluesky mentioned:
- Misleading content material (impersonation, misinformation, or false claims about identification or affiliations): 1.20 million
- Spam (extreme mentions, replies, or repetitive content material): 1.40 million
- Unwanted sexual content material (nudity or grownup content material not correctly labeled): 630,000
- Illegal or pressing points (clear violations of the regulation or Bluesky’s phrases of service): 933,000
- Other (points that don’t match into the above classes): 726,000
The firm additionally provided an replace on its labeling service, which includes labels added to posts and accounts. Human labelers added 55,422 “sexual determine” labels, adopted by 22,412 “impolite” labels, 13,201 “spam” labels, 11,341 “illiberal” labels, and three,046 “menace” labels.
In 2024, 93,076 customers submitted a complete of 205,000 appeals over Bluesky’s moderation choice.
There had been additionally 66,308 account takedowns from moderators and 35,842 automated account takedowns. Bluesky moreover fielded 238 requests from regulation enforcement, governments, and authorized corporations. The firm responded to 182 of those and complied with 146. Most of the requests had been regulation enforcement requests from Germany, the U.S., Brazil, and Japan, it mentioned.
Bluesky’s full report additionally delves into different kinds of points, together with trademark and copyright claims and youngster security/CSAM reviews. The firm famous it submitted 1,154 confirmed CSAM reviews to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC).
