Bluesky has seen a surge in users in the past year due to X/Twitter’s refusal to censor hateful and negative content, as well as the Brazilian government taking action to block the app from operating in the country due to this issue.
The new social media app had 26 million users on the platform by the end of 2024, and while that’s great and allows the platform to grow with new users, it also comes with some pretty negative effects.
Bluesky has just released its Bluesky 2024 Moderation Report and says that with the increase in users, they have also seen an increase in the number of reports of negative content on their platform.
In 2023, Bluesky recorded 358 thousand such reports, and in 2024, that number increased to 6.48 million, which is a 17x increase year-on-year. The number of reports has increased dramatically as many Brazilian users migrated from X to Bluesky due to the ban on the app by the country's government.
In the weeks since the incident, Bluesky has been receiving 50,000 reports of negative content every day, broken down into the following categories:
Anti-social behaviour – 1.75 million reports
Misleading/deceptive content – 1.2 million reports
Spam – 1.4 million reports
Sexual content not labelled as such – 630,000
Content that violates the platform's code of conduct – 933,000
Other – 726,000
In light of this, Bluesky also said that it has closed 35,842 accounts for spamming and suspected botnets. It has also received 238 requests from government agencies, including the United States, Germany, Japan and Brazil.
For 2024, apart from updating their moderation system, focus will also be given to content related to child sexual abuse, to ensure that such content has no place on the Bluesky platform.