Bluesky, a social networking startup that is building a decentralized alternative to X (formerly Twitter), provided an update on Wednesday about how it is addressing various reliability and safety concerns on its platform. The company is in various stages of developing and piloting various initiatives focused on addressing bad actors, harassment, spam, fake accounts, video safety, and more.
To combat malicious users and those harassing others, Bluesky says it is developing new tools that can detect if multiple new accounts are created and controlled by the same person, potentially reducing the number of different personas bad actors can create to target and harass victims.
Another new experiment will help detect “rude” replies and notify server moderators. Like Mastodon, Bluesky supports a network where self-hosting users and other developers can run their own servers and connect to Bluesky's servers or other servers on the network. This federation feature is still in early access, but in the future, server moderators will be able to decide what action to take against users who post rude replies. Meanwhile, Bluesky plans to eventually reduce the visibility of these replies in the app. Repeated labeling of content as rude will result in account-level labels and even account suspensions, the company said.
To reduce the use of lists to harass others, Bluesky removes users from lists who have blocked the list creator. A similar feature was recently introduced to Starter Packs, a type of shareable list that helps new users find people to follow on the platform (see TechCrunch Starter Pack).
Bluesky will also scan for lists with abusive names or descriptions to reduce users who harass others by adding them to public lists with harmful or abusive names or descriptions. Users who violate Bluesky's community guidelines will be hidden in the app until the list owner changes it to comply with Bluesky's rules. Further action will be taken against users who continue to create abusive lists, but the company did not provide details, adding that lists remain an area of active discussion and development.
In the coming months, Bluesky plans to move to handling moderation reports through the app, using notifications, rather than relying on email reports.
To combat spam and other fake accounts, Bluesky is launching a pilot program to automatically detect fake, scam and spam accounts. Combined with moderation, the goal is to be able to take action against accounts “within seconds” of being reported, the company said.
One of the most interesting developments is how Bluesky allows users to respect local laws while still allowing freedom of speech. To comply with the law, they can use region-specific labels to hide some of their content from users in certain regions.
“This enables Bluesky's moderation services to maintain flexibility to create a space for free expression, while ensuring legal compliance and allowing Bluesky to continue operating its services in these regions,” the company said in a blog post. “This feature will be rolled out on a country-by-country basis, and we aim to inform users about the origins of legal requests wherever legally possible.”
To address potential issues around the trustworthiness and safety of recently added videos, the team is adding features like the ability to turn off autoplay on videos, label videos, and enable reporting videos. We're still evaluating what else we need to add, but will prioritize based on user feedback.
When it comes to abuse, the company says its overall framework is to “ask how often something happens and how harmful it is.” The company focuses on addressing high-harm and high-frequency issues, while also “tracking edge cases that may cause severe harm to a small number of users.” The latter only affects a small number of users, but causes enough “ongoing harm” that Bluesky claims it takes steps to prevent abuse.
User concerns can be raised through reports, emails, and mentions to the @safety.bsky.app account.