Bluesky, the startup aiming to build a decentralized social network to rival Twitter/X, says it has begun deploying new security tools to help manage content on the network through automation. Although still in private beta, the company has already made headlines over issues with content moderation in recent months after it did not initially ban any members making death threats, and later discovered that some people were creating accounts containing racial slurs. In their accounts. Usernames.
Now, the company says through a mail Bluesky Safety says it’s launching “more advanced automated tools” designed to flag content that violates its community guidelines. Flagged content can then be reviewed by Bluesky’s moderation team to make a final decision.
“We will repeat this so that mods can review offensive content, spam, etc. without any users seeing it first,” the post noted.
Additionally, the company said it will also add the ability for users to report their own posts of mislabeled content to help the moderation team fix incorrect labels. Today, users can see if their posts contain adult content, for example, from the creation screen in the Bluesky app. Until then, other accounts will be able to submit reports about misclassifications on behalf of users.
Bluesky also promoted the launch of other new features including User Lists (general lists of users) and Moderation Lists (lists you create to mute or block multiple users at once). Additionally, the ability to sync users’ moderation preferences between devices and remove adult content labels from posts without images has been added.
Beyond moderation, Bluesky is developing another feature that X already offers: the ability to control who can respond to your posts. For example, users will soon be able to limit replies to only people they follow or users on a specific list. This is similar to the existing
Despite these changes, some Bluesky users are still advocating for the ability to set their accounts to private — a feature they’ve come to increasingly need after Bluesky announced it would launch a public web interface that would allow users without an invitation to the network the ability to do so. To browse posts. This led to increased demand for a private, friends-only account type, similar to X, as many users did not want to make their posts available to the world. Others are calling for the ability to remove followers and urging Bluesky to completely ban accounts that violate the company’s guidelines.
Although many users had verbally expressed interest in an alternative to the The startup did not succeed in growing its user base sufficiently and closed its doors in October.