Bluesky experienced explosive growth last year, which requires the platform to increase its moderation efforts. In its recently released 2024 valuation report, Bluesky said it grew by about 23 million users, from 2.9 million users to about 26 million. Also, its moderators received 17 times the number of user reports they received in 2023 – 6.48 million in 2024 compared to 358,000 last year.
Many of these reports were related to “harassment, trolling or intolerance,” spam and misleading content (including impersonation and misinformation). The presence of fake accounts behind Bluesky’s popularity, and the platform is taking a “very aggressive” approach in an effort to eradicate it. At the time, it said it had repeated its inspection team four times. A new report says Bluesky’s valuation team has grown to 100, and hiring is underway. “Some moderators specialize in specific policy areas, such as dedicated child protection agents,” it notes.
Other categories Bluesky says it has received many reports about include “illegal and urgent news” and unwanted sexual content. There were also 726,000 reports marked as “other.” Bluesky says it complied with 146 requests from “law enforcement, governments, law firms” out of a total of 238 last year.
The platform plans to make some changes to the way reports and complaints are handled this year that it says will “facilitate communication with users,” such as providing users with updates on actions they’ve taken on content they’ve reported, and, further down the line, allowing users to appeal takedown decisions directly from the app. Moderators took down 66,308 accounts in 2024, while its automated systems took down 35,842 spam and bot profiles. “Looking ahead to 2025, we are investing in strong detection systems to keep up with user reporting, as the growing network requires more ways to quickly identify and deal with malicious content,” Bluesky said.