Among the challenges facing the fledgling social media network Bluesky are government censorship, fake accounts, celebrity imitation, misinformation, and a user revolt over a journalist who was accused of denigrating trans people. However, they also demonstrate how quickly it has grown after the election.
Bluesky is paying the price of success as it draws more users, especially from those escaping Elon Musk’s X: difficult moderation choices and an increase in malicious actors.
ClearSky, an analytics site, reports that about 25 million people have registered for the platform. Even if that figure still represents a small portion of X’s user base, Bluesky’s problems and conflicts are becoming more well known, which is an indication of its growing cultural significance.
User response against journalist and media celebrity Jesse Singal joining the platform last week was the biggest controversy the platform has ever encountered. Singal presents a podcast that criticizes alleged left-wing biases in the media and has written on transgender issues, including those who reversed their gender transitions. Singal was part of the LGBTQ group GLAAD’s Accountability Project, which documented public personalities’ discriminatory acts and anti-LGBTQ language.
More than 25,000 individuals signed a petition demanding that Singal be removed from Bluesky, a site that is regarded as a gathering place for transgender social media users, in accordance with the platform’s moderation guidelines. On Bluesky, Singal is now the most blocked user. In its answer to the petition, Bluesky stated that it does not delete accounts based on behavior off the site, although it did not specifically address Singal. When asked about the situation surrounding Singal, who has claimed to have received death threats that he believes the platform has not sufficiently addressed, Bluesky chose not to answer an NBC News inquiry.
The majority of Bluesky users seem to be sticking with the platform, even if the controversy has spread to other social media sites like X and drawn attention from well-known people like Lizzo.
In addition to cultural flashpoints, Bluesky is battling a number of serious moderation problems that come with being well-liked.
This November, the organization reported that it received a record 42,000 moderation reports in a single 24-hour period. Bluesky added, “We appreciate your patience as we bring on new team members to support this load and dial up our moderation team to maximum capacity.”
Brazilian fans, including fan communities dedicated to specific artists, flooded Bluesky after Brazil’s top court blocked access to X in August. In an interview, Aaron Rodericks, Bluesky’s head of trust and safety, stated that the company’s small moderation team had to decide which postings to keep and which to delete due to the surge of copyright complaints.
Memes are popular among Brazilians. They have an amazing user base. However, our copyright requests skyrocketed, Rodericks, a former member of Twitter’s trust and safety team, said.
Sean Gallagher, a chief threat researcher at the cybersecurity firm Sophos, told NBC News that scammers have also tracked social network users’ transition from X to Bluesky. He claimed that fraud activity has rapidly increased during the last few weeks.
According to Gallagher, many of these fraudsters are romance and pig butchers who utilize the same strategy they employ on other social media platforms: they pretend to be love possibilities in an attempt to build a fictitious relationship with a victim that they can then take advantage of for financial gain.
According to Gallagher, Bluesky has so far been aggressive in closing bogus accounts and seems to react favorably to users who report questionable accounts.
According to Rodericks, Bluesky has gone through some teething pains, but not to the same extent as other significant social media sites. There are certain negative effects of hundreds of millions of users that we haven’t yet noticed.
However, some critics have continued to focus on the problems despite this.
X account on the far right Citing screenshots of posts on the site, including one by Singal about the death threats he claimed to have received and another about child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on the network, libs of TikTok, a platform notorious for harassing trans people online, attacked Bluesky on Thursday.
According to Rodericks, Bluesky has only observed a small amount of CSAM posts compared to the volume observed on other platforms, but the number is rising.
Only one confirmed complaint was made to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, the U.S. agency responsible for monitoring internet exploitation, in 2023, when the website was only accessible by invitation and had not yet been made public. According to Rodericks, the organization manually investigates each of the more than 830 CSAM cases that have occurred this year. CSAM rates are significantly higher on the majority of major social media platforms. According to the center, X reported 273,416 cases of CSAM on its platforms in 2023. 11,430,007 were reported by Instagram.
According to Rodericks, posting CSAM results in an instant and complete ban from the website.
Fake celebrity accounts are another issue on the web, which also affects bigger platforms. Bluesky ended the dominance of a few accounts that registered famous people’s usernames shortly after the platform opened last month by identifying phony celebrity accounts with impersonation if they didn’t identify themselves as satire or fan accounts.
NBC News discovered a few unlabeled but obviously fraudulent profiles for celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres, Oprah Winfrey, and Cristiano Ronaldo with ease, despite the fact that it doesn’t seem like there is a large network of celebrity impersonators looking to defraud customers. Requests for comment from those three’s representatives were not answered.
Compared to other websites, Bluesky’s method of confirming that accounts are who they claim to be is both distinct and more technically challenging. This issue has plagued Xin in especially since Musk’s reforms last year. Anyone who owns a web domain can create a Bluesky account using that URL because it treats each account as a website. Therefore, anyone with an official website can verify themselves and other users instead of Bluesky confirming people’s identities one at a time.
Because individuals are only accustomed to usernames, we are receiving comments that some people find it too technically difficult. According to Rodericks, the challenge is whether we can satisfy those objectives through domain verification with sufficient user education, etc., or whether we need to include more factors.
According to Rodericks, Bluesky does not currently have intentions to categorize state-run news organizations as belonging to authoritarian nations, unlike Meta and X until Musk stopped doing so. This is because of the company’s low resources. At least three Bluesky accounts, including RT from Russia and China Daily and People’s Daily from China, use the identities of state-run news outlets and only share content from them. However, none of these accounts have more than a few hundred followers. Emails asking whether those accounts were real received no response from any of the three news organizations.
Although they hardly ever gain much traction, disinformation experts frequently spot account swarms on major social media platforms that are pushing messages that are supportive of the governments of China, Iran, and Russia. These investigations frequently begin when the FBI notifies U.S. intelligence about a social media site being used by an enemy of the United States.
According to Rodericks, the FBI has not reached out to Bluesky in that manner as of yet. Additionally, it lacks a specialized internal team to hunt down that type of propaganda; instead, it uses user tips, automated sensors to detect fraudulent account activity, and a volunteer moderator army run by a nonprofit organization called Independent Federated Trust & Safety to find and remove content that breaches its terms of service.
Although there are currently no well-documented widespread misinformation operations on Bluesky, researchers have noticed certain indications.
Lisa Kaplan, CEO of Alethea, a business that monitors coordinated online communications and misinformation campaigns, told NBC News that enemies use all social media platforms. Evidence of what appears to be state actor activity on the platform has been observed. However, we have yet to witness an effective, concerted effort, and it is still early.
People aren’t investing resources in us from a nation-state perspective because, generally speaking, we’re still very small fries, Rodericks stated.
At least two censorship-prone regimes have blocked Bluesky. China started blocking Bluesky before June 4, the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, which is a regular catalyst for censorship in the nation, according to the Great Firewall, a tool that monitors internet censorship in China. Separately, according to NetBlocks, a business that monitors worldwide internet censorship, Pakistan temporarily disabled Bluesky in November. Requests for comment from the consulates of both nations were not answered.
Every social media company must choose between abiding by the rules of every nation in which it wishes to conduct business and refusing to comply with unjust government orders to remove postings or provide user data. However, Rodericks said that China and Pakistan did not start a discussion.
According to him, neither government has reached out or communicated with Bluesky in any way. We will make every effort to encourage residents’ access to community information since, from a principles standpoint, we naturally support a free and open internet. However, as a minor participant in this field, we will make every effort to promote our objective balance against nations having sovereignty over their own internet.
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