Government censorship, scam accounts, celebrity impersonations, publicity and user resistance to a journalist accused of demonizing transgender people — these are just some of the obstacles facing emerging social media platform Bluesky. But they are also signs of rapid growth since the election.
As Bluesky attracts more activity, especially from those Escape from Elon Musk’s Xit faces the price of success: tough moderation decisions and a growing number of bad actors.
Nearly 25 million people have registered on the platform, according to Indicators website ClearSky. While this number still represents only a small portion of the X user base, Bluesky’s controversies and challenges are gaining mainstream attention, indicating its growing cultural relevance.
Last week, the platform faced its most significant controversy yet: users strongly opposed journalist and media personality Jesse Singal joining the platform. Zinger has reported on a number of transgender-related topics, including people reversing their gender transition, and hosts a podcast criticizing perceived left-wing bias in the media. LGBTQ non-profit organizations Grad Included Singal in its accountability project to document “anti-LGBTQ comments and discriminatory behavior” by public figures.
Singal’s appearance on Bluesky, considered a hub for transgender social media users, sparked a petition More than 25,000 people signed a petition calling for his removal under the platform’s moderation policy. Singal is now the most blocked person on Bluesky. Bluesky did not explicitly mention Singal in its response to the petition, but release It does not delete accounts based on activity outside the platform. Bluesky did not respond to NBC News’ questions about the Singal controversy. reported He said the platform did not adequately address the issue after receiving death threats.
Although the outcry spread to other social media platforms such as X and attracted the attention of mainstream media People like Lizzomost Bluesky users seem to stick with the platform.
Beyond the cultural buzz, Bluesky faces a host of substantial moderation issues that come at the expense of popularity.
In one 24-hour period in November, the company announced it received a record 42,000 audit reports. “We appreciate your patience as we scale our review team to maximum capacity and hire new team members to support this load,” Lan Tian said.
After Brazil’s Supreme Court suspended access to X in August, Bluesky saw a surge in Brazilian users, including “Stan” community Dedicated to a specific artist. This resulted in an influx of copyright complaints, forcing Bluesky’s smaller moderation team to sort through which posts to keep and which posts to remove, Aaron Rodericks, director of trust and safety at Bluesky, said in an interview.
“Brazilians love making memes. They’re a great user base. But our copyright requests were very strong,” said Rodriquez, who helped lead Twitter’s trust and safety team.
Sean Gallagher, chief threat researcher at cybersecurity firm Sophos, told NBC News that scammers are also tracking social media users migrating from X to Bluesky. “There has been a rapid increase in fraud activity over the past few weeks,” he said.
Gallagher said many are romance scammers and scammers who follow the same playbook used on other social media sites: posing as romantic prospects in the hope of establishing a fake relationship with the victim for future use. Use them to make money.
Gallagher said that so far, Bluesky has “been aggressively shutting down fraudulent accounts” and appears to respond well to people who report suspicious accounts.
Rodriquez said that while Bluesky has experienced growing pains, it still doesn’t have the scale seen on other major social media platforms. “In terms of harm, there are things that come with hundreds of millions of users that we haven’t seen yet.”
But that hasn’t stopped some critics from focusing on these issues.
TikTok’s far-right X account LibsThe site known for targeting trans people online criticized Bluesky on Thursday and posted screenshots of articles about the platform, including one written by Singal about death threats he claimed to have received, and another about Articles on child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on this platform.
Rodericks said Bluesky has seen a small number of people posting CSAM compared to levels on other platforms, but the number is growing.
In 2023, only one verified complaint was received to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the U.S. organization responsible for tracking online exploitation, although the site was only accessible by invitation and before opening to the public. Rodericks said there have been more than 830 CSAM cases this year, and the company manually investigates each case. Most major social media platforms report much higher CSAM rates. According to the center, in 2023, X reported 273,416 instances of CSAM on its platform. Instagram reported 11,430,007.
Rodriquez said posting CSAM would result in an immediate and complete ban on the site.
The site also hosts a number of fake celebrity accounts, an issue that continues to plague larger platforms as well. Last month, Bluesky began labeling fake celebrity accounts “impersonation” as long as they didn’t label themselves satire or fan accounts, ending the reign of a handful of accounts that signed up for celebrity usernames soon after the platform launched .
While there doesn’t appear to be a vast ecosystem of celebrity impersonators aiming to deceive users, NBC News easily uncovered some unlabeled but clearly fake celebrity accounts, such as Ellen DeGeneres , Oprah Winfrey and Cristiano Ronaldo. Representatives for the three men did not respond to requests for comment.
Bluesky’s method of verifying the true identity of an account—this problem already exists TroubledX Especially since the changes Musk made last year, it’s both unique and technically more difficult than other sites. It treats each account as a website and allows anyone with a web domain to register a Bluesky account using that URL. So instead of verifying people’s identities individually, Bluesky lets anyone with an official website verify themselves and other users’ identities.
“The feedback we’ve received is that some people find it too technically challenging because people are just used to usernames. So the question is, with enough user education etc., can we satisfy that with domain verification?” Those needs, or do we have to add other aspects on top of that,” Rodriquez said.
Rodriquez said that given Bluesky’s limited resources, it has no immediate plans to label state-controlled news organizations as authoritarian governments, as Meta and X did before Musk ended the practice. At least three Blue Sky accounts use the names of state-controlled news organizations and publish only reports from China’s China Daily and People’s Daily and Russia’s RT, but none has more than a few hundred followers. None of the three news organizations responded to emails asking whether the accounts were authentic.
Disinformation researchers often identify groups of accounts, particularly on major social media platforms, pushing messages sympathetic to the governments of Russia, China and Iran, although they rarely gain significant traction. Typically, these investigations begin when the FBI alerts social media platforms that U.S. intelligence agencies are being exploited by U.S. adversaries
To date, the FBI has not made such contact with Blue Sky, Rodriquez said. It also doesn’t have a dedicated internal team to hunt for such propaganda, relying instead on user prompts, automated sensors to detect inauthentic account behavior, and an army of volunteer reviewers managed through nonprofit organizations. Independent United Trust and Security Identify and cancel activities that violate their terms of service.
While there are no clear records of large-scale propaganda campaigns in Blue Skies so far, researchers have seen some signs.
“All social media platforms are used by adversaries,” Alethea CEO Lisa Kaplan told NBC News. “We have seen evidence of possible state actor activity on the platform. That said, it is early days and we have not seen a successful, coordinated effort.”
“In general, we’re still small, so people aren’t devoting resources to us from a nation-state perspective,” Rodriquez said.
Bluesky has been blocked by at least two governments vulnerable to censorship. According to the Great Firewall of China, a program that tracks internet censorship in China, the country Start blocking June 4th is Bluesky’s anniversary Tiananmen Square Protests are a common irritant to censorship in the country. In addition, Pakistan temporarily blocked Bluesky in November, according to data from NetBlocks, a company that tracks global internet blockades. Spokespersons for both consulates did not respond to requests for comment.
Every social media platform must maintain a balance between complying with the laws of each country in which it wants to operate and deciding to resist potentially unfair government demands to block posts or hand over user information. But Rodriquez said China and Pakistan did not spark controversy.
“Neither government has had any type of outreach or communication with Blue Sky,” he said. “From a principle perspective, we certainly believe in a free and open internet, so we will do our best to support citizens’ ability to access community information. But as a small player in this space, we will do everything we can to promote our objectivity Balance to prevent countries from being able to control their own networks.
