Two different outlets published stories yesterday about Bluesky’s growing pains. One problem is that as the platform has grown, it has increasingly become worth the time and attention of spammers and bots.
“They got this spike in attention, they’ve crossed the threshold where it is now worth it for people to flood the platform with spam,” said Laura Edelson, an assistant professor of computer science at Northeastern University and a member of Issue One’s Council for Responsible Social Media. “But they don’t have the cash flow, they don’t have the established team that a larger platform would, so they have to do it all very, very quickly.”…
Compared to the bigger players like Meta’s platforms or X, Bluesky has a “quite different” value system, said Claire Wardle, a professor at Cornell University and an expert in misinformation.
“People had this idea that it was going to be a different type of social network,” Wardle said. “But the truth is, when you get lots of people in a place and there are eyeballs, it means that it’s in other people’s interests to use bots to create, you know, information that aligns with their perspective.”
And that’s not the worst of it. Other problems associated with the big social media sites are also cropping up at Bluesky.
Scammers have also followed the migration of social media users from X to Bluesky, Sean Gallagher, a principal threat researcher at the cybersecurity company Sophos, told NBC News. “Over the past few weeks, there has been a rapid increase in scam activity,” he said.
Many are romance and “pig butchering” scammers who follow the same playbook they use on other social media sites: posing as romantic prospects in the hopes of establishing a fake relationship with a victim they can later exploit for money, Gallagher said.
The number of posts involving child sexual abuse has also been growing.
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.”
And then there are the moderation problems that seem unique to Bluesky, which has mostly presented itself as a safe space for progressives. That means there are demands to remove anyone who offends their delicate sensibilities.
Last week, the platform faced its most significant controversy yet: user backlash against journalist and media personality Jesse Singal joining the platform. Singal, who has reported on people who reversed their gender transitions among other topics pertaining to trans people, hosts a podcast that critiques perceived left-wing biases in media. LGBTQ nonprofit GLAAD included Singal in its Accountability Project documenting “anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and discriminatory actions” by public figures.
Singal’s presence on Bluesky, considered a hub for trans social media users, sparked a petition signed by over 25,000 people calling for his removal under the platform’s moderation policies. Singal is now the most blocked person on Bluesky. Bluesky didn’t address Singal explicitly in its response to the petition, but posted that it does not take down accounts based on activity off the platform. Bluesky didn’t respond to an NBC News question about the controversy around Singal, who has reported receiving death threats he says the platform has not adequately addressed.
Ultimately the site chose not to ban Singal and that led to a backlash against Aaron Rodericks, the site’s head of Trust & Safety for refusing to remove Singal. For his part, Singal continues to attack the site as a safe space for lunatics.
All the most talented freelancers have skittered off to Bluesky, where they can spread their incredible ideas without having to face the trauma of being disagreed with pic.twitter.com/A5lU7E3Gf1
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) December 22, 2024
There are corners of Bluesky that are so strange that even I shan’t be posting screenshots of them here.
A: Wait, so you’re saying [some made-up rumor]
Everyone: [MADE UP RUMOR]!!!
They make QAnon moms look like models of skepticism and epistemic humility. https://t.co/0hpSJnpTVg
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) December 23, 2024
He also has pointed out that the claim that Bluesky now has 25 million users wildly exaggerates the amount of activity taking place there.
I guess we’ll see where the trend goes from here but this graph suggests Bluesky did indeed get a surge of new users around the election, and then many of them were immediately turned off and became inactive. 🤔🤔https://t.co/d3zRbQIzL5 pic.twitter.com/lqEBM5HJkw
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) December 23, 2024
Even at its peak, only a tiny fraction of Bluesky users were actually posting.
Mea culpa b/c I contributed to this. But are journos gonna press Bluesky over the relevance of that viral “25 million users” figure? Like, congrats, but if these numbers are right then at the *peak* of the site’s postelection popularity, only ~6%(!!) of those ‘users’ were posting… pic.twitter.com/yQz9mUbUE5
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) December 23, 2024
If you follow that link to Bluesky’s stats page, it suggests that 90% of users have fewer than 35 followers. Only the top 0.3% of accounts have more than 1,000 followers. I should note that I haven’t used Bluesky so I don’t know if followers works the same as it does on X, but it sounds like only a tiny handful of accounts (maybe 8,000 out of 25,000,000) have any significant number of followers. This might explain why most people aren’t posting anything. What’s the point if you’re in the 75% of users who have 6 or fewer followers? You could get more attention shouting out a window.
