Last year, Bluesky experienced explosive growth, especially towards the end, which required the platform to step up its moderation efforts. In its recently released 2024 Moderation Report, Bluesky reported that the number of users grew by approximately 23 million, increasing from 2.9 million users to nearly 26 million. In addition, its moderators received 17 times more messages from users than in 2023 – 6.48 million in 2024 compared to 358,000 the previous year.
Most of these reports were related to “harassment, trolling, or intolerance,” spam, and misleading content (including impersonation and disinformation). The presence of impersonation accounts has become a prominent issue following the surge in popularity of Bluesky, and in November, the platform updated its impersonation policy, taking a “more aggressive” approach in an attempt to combat the phenomenon. At the time, it said it had quadrupled its team of moderators. The new report says that Bluesky’s team of moderators has grown to about 100 people, and recruitment is ongoing. “Some moderators specialize in certain policy areas, such as child safety,” the report says.
Other categories that Bluesky says it received a lot of reports about include “illegal and urgent issues” and unwanted sexual content. There were also 726,000 messages labeled as “other.” Bluesky claims to have satisfied 146 requests from “law enforcement, governments, law firms” out of a total of 238 last year.
This year, the platform plans to make some changes to the way it handles notifications and appeals, which it says will “streamline communication with users,” such as providing users with information about actions taken against the content they reported, and in the future, allowing users to appeal removal decisions directly in the app. In 2024, moderators removed 66,308 accounts, and automated systems removed 35,842 spam and bot profiles. “Looking ahead to 2025, we are investing in more powerful proactive detection systems to complement user reports, as the growing network requires multiple detection methods to quickly identify and eliminate malicious content,” says Bluesky.
