Bluesky on Friday revealed its moderation report for the previous yr, noting the sizable development the social community skilled in 2024 and the way that affected its Belief & Security staff’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 instances over particular person moderation choices.
The corporate’s report didn’t deal with or clarify why it did or didn’t take motion on particular person customers, together with these on the most-blocked checklist.
The corporate added over 23 million customers in 2024, as Bluesky turned a brand new vacation spot for former Twitter/X customers for numerous causes. All year long, the social community benefitted from a number of modifications at X, together with its resolution to vary how blocking works and practice AI on person information. Different customers left X after the outcomes of the U.S. presidential election, primarily based on how X proprietor Elon Musk’s politics started to dominate the platform. The app additionally surged in customers whereas X was briefly banned in Brazil again in September.
To fulfill the calls for attributable to this development, Bluesky elevated its moderation staff to roughly 100 moderators, it stated, and is continuous to rent. The corporate additionally started providing staff members psychological counseling to assist them with the troublesome job of being continuously uncovered to graphic content material. (An space we hope AI will at some point deal with, as people will not be constructed to deal with this sort of work.)
In complete, there have been 6.48 million reviews to Bluesky’s moderation service, up 17x from 2023 when there have been solely 358,000 reviews.
Beginning this yr, Bluesky will start to just accept moderation reviews instantly from its app. Much like X, it will permit customers to trace actions and updates extra simply. Later, it’s going to assist 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 workers, together with via a contract vendor.
As well as, Bluesky started automating extra classes of reviews past simply spam to assist it deal with the inflow, although this typically led to false positives. Nonetheless, the automation helped drop the processing time to only “seconds” for “high-certainty” accounts. Earlier than automation, most reviews have been dealt with inside 40 minutes. Now, human moderators are saved within the loop to handle the false positives and appeals, if not at all times dealing with the preliminary resolution.
Bluesky says that 4.57% of its lively customers (1.19 million) made at the least one moderation report in 2024, down from 5.6% in 2023. Most of those — 3.5 million reviews — have been for particular person posts. Account profiles have been reported 47,000 instances, typically for a profile image or banner photograph. Lists have been reported 45,000 instances; DMs have been reported 17,700 instances, with feeds and Starter Packs receiving 5,300 and 1,900 reviews, respectively.
Most reviews have been over anti-social conduct, like trolling and harassment — a sign from Bluesky customers that they need to see a much less poisonous social community, as in contrast with X.
Different reviews have been for the next classes, Bluesky stated:
- Deceptive 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
- Undesirable sexual content material (nudity or grownup content material not correctly labeled): 630,000
- Unlawful or pressing points (clear violations of the legislation or Bluesky’s phrases of service): 933,000
- Different (points that don’t match into the above classes): 726,000
The corporate 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 “risk” labels.
In 2024, 93,076 customers submitted a complete of 205,000 appeals over Bluesky’s moderation resolution.
There have been additionally 66,308 account takedowns from moderators and 35,842 automated account takedowns. Bluesky moreover fielded 238 requests from legislation enforcement, governments, and authorized companies. The corporate responded to 182 of those and complied with 146. A lot of the requests have been legislation enforcement requests from Germany, the U.S., Brazil, and Japan, it stated.
Bluesky’s full report additionally delves into different sorts of points, together with trademark and copyright claims and youngster security/CSAM reviews. The corporate famous it submitted 1,154 confirmed CSAM reviews to the Nationwide Centre for Lacking and Exploited Kids (NCMEC).
