A surge in new users to social media platform BlueSky has also brought a rise in “harmful content,” leading to a mass moderation campaign to purge images from the network, the platform said on Monday.
“We're experiencing a huge influx of users, and with that, a predictable uptick in harmful content posted to the network,” BlueSky’s Safety account said. “As a result, for some very high-severity policy areas like child safety, we recently made some short-term moderation choices to prioritize recall over precision.”
After President-elect Donald Trump’s victory earlier this month, millions of users abandoned X, the platform formerly known as Twitter in search of alternatives.
Many migrated to alternative social media platforms, with 35 million joining Meta’s Threads and 20 million flocking to BlueSky—the decentralized social media platform launched by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey—during the past three weeks alone.
Bluesky Raises $15 Million From Crypto Firms—But Says No to Tokens
Bluesky, the social media platform that has seen surging growth following Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, raised $15 million in a funding round led by a crypto-focused venture capital firm, the company announced Thursday. But that doesn't mean the social media network plans to embrace digital assets. The Series A funding round was led by Blockchain Capital, a venture firm that has invested in OpenSea, Kraken, and Coinbase. Several other crypto-related venture firms—including SevenX, True Ventu...
The flood of new users added to the more than one million Brazilians who flocked to BlueSky after a judge in the South American nation banned X in September.
BlueSky saw another surge in October after X owner Elon Musk said tweets could be used to train the Grok AI.
However, along with its new users, earlier this month, BlueSky reported a surge in spam, scams, and “trolling activity,” alongside a troubling rise in child sexual abuse material.
According to a report by tech website Platformer, in 2023, BlueSky had two confirmed cases of child-oriented sexual content posted on the network. On Monday, there were eight confirmed cases.
Crypto, AI Heavyweights Backed Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover
X, formerly known as Twitter, has released a list of its previously undisclosed shareholders, revealing the role several crypto-focused firms played in Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover of the social media platform in 2022. The company’s shareholder list was made public on Wednesday to comply with a legal order. The document, which names nearly 100 entities, includes Binance Capital Management and several prominent venture capital firms with AI and crypto-focused investments. These include Andre...
“In the past 24 hours, we have received more than 42,000 reports (an all-time high for one day). We’re receiving about 3,000 reports/hour. To put that into context, in all of 2023, we received 360k reports,” BlueSky said.
BlueSky said that its mass moderation might have resulted in “over-enforcement” and account suspensions. Some of the wrongly suspended accounts were reinstated, while others could still file appeals.
“We’re expanding our moderation team as we grow to improve both the timeliness and accuracy of our moderation actions,” the company said.
To curb AI-generated deepfakes on its platform, BlueSky partnered with Los Angeles-headquartered nonprofit Thorn in January.
BlueSky deployed Thorn’s AI-powered Safer moderation technology, which detects child-oriented sexual content, including text-based material that "may indicate instances of threats that could lead to sexual harm against children."
Expert Untangles VPNs as Brazil’s Twitter Ban Sparks New Interest
Last week, the government of Brazil banned X, formerly Twitter, cutting off millions of users from the Elon Musk-owned social network. It is one of the more high-profile examples of restrictions placed on platforms, and disputes around the world span a multitude of reasons: free speech (at least in the U.S.), political dissent, copyright, and illegal activity. While alternate social media platforms like Bluesky saw a surge in new users from Brazil after the ban, some still insistent on using X h...
While X does allow adult content, in May, the social media platform said it had also implemented Thorn’s Safer technology to combat child sexual abuse material on the site.
“We’ve learned a lot from our beta testing,” Thorn's VP of data science Rebecca Portnoff told Decrypt at the time.
“While we knew going in that child sexual abuse manifests in all types of content, including text, we saw concretely in this beta testing how machine learning/AI for text can have real-life impact at scale,” she said.
Edited by Sebastian Sinclair and Josh Quittner
Editor's note: Adds clarity over Thorn's status as a nonprofit.
