Social networking startup Bluesky, which is building a decentralized alternative to X (formerly known as Twitter), provided an update on Wednesday on how it’s addressing various trust and safety concerns on its platform. The company is in various stages of developing and piloting a range of initiatives focused on tackling bad actors, harassment, spam, fake accounts, video safety, and more.
To address malicious users or those who harass others, Bluesky says it is developing new tools that will be able to detect when multiple new accounts are created and managed by the same person. This could help reduce harassment, where a bad actor creates multiple different personas to target their victims.
Another new experience will help detect “rude” responses and show them to server admins. Similar to Mastodon, Bluesky will support a network where self-hosts and other developers can run their own servers that connect to Bluesky’s server and others on the network. This ability to federate Still in early accessHowever, in the future, server admins will be able to decide how to take action against those who post rude replies. In the meantime, Bluesky will eventually reduce the visibility of these replies in its app. It says that repeated flagging of rude content will also result in account-level flagging and suspension.
To reduce the use of lists to harass others, Bluesky will remove individual users from the list if they block the list creator. A similar feature was recently rolled out for starter packs, a type of shareable list that can help new users find people to follow on the platform (see TechCrunch Starter Kit).
Bluesky will also be screening lists that contain offensive names or descriptions to limit the ability for people to harass others by adding them to a public list with a toxic or offensive name or description. Those who violate Bluesky’s community guidelines will be hidden in the app until the list owner makes changes to comply with Bluesky’s rules. Other action will also be taken against users who continue to create offensive lists, though the company did not provide specifics, adding that lists are still an area for active discussion and development.
In the coming months, Bluesky will also move to handling modification reports through its app using notifications, rather than relying on email reports.
To combat spam and other fake accounts, Bluesky has launched a pilot program that will attempt to automatically detect fake, fraudulent or otherwise annoying accounts. The goal, along with moderation, is to be able to take action on accounts within “seconds of receiving a report,” the company said.
One of the more interesting developments is how Bluesky complies with local laws while allowing freedom of expression. It will use specific geotags that allow it to hide some content from users in a certain region to comply with the law.
“This allows Bluesky’s content moderation service to maintain the flexibility to create a space for free expression, while ensuring legal compliance so that Bluesky can continue to operate as a service in those geographies,” the company shared in a blog post. “This feature will be introduced on a country-by-country basis, and we will aim to inform users of the source of legal requests whenever legally possible.”
To address potential trust and safety issues with recently added video, the team is adding features like the ability to turn off autoplay for videos, ensure a video is flagged, and ensure videos can be reported. The team is still evaluating what else needs to be added, which will be prioritized based on user feedback.
When it comes to abuse, the company says its general framework is to “ask how often something happens versus how harmful it is.” The company focuses on addressing high-harm, high-frequency issues while “tracking down the marginal cases that could cause significant harm to a small number of users.” The latter, the company claims, while affecting a small number of people, cause enough “ongoing harm” to take action to prevent abuse.
User concerns can be raised via reports, emails and references to @safety.bsky app account.