Twitter rival Bluesky fights a flood of spam, scams, and harmful content as millions join

The Bluesky social media platform that is growing rapidly after Donald Trump’s U.S. election victory has announced it is dealing with a large spike in spam, harmful content, and scams.

“In the past 24 hours, we have received more than 42,000 reports (an all-time high for one day). We’re receiving about 3,000 reports/hour. To put that into context, in all of 2023, we received 360k reports,” said the Bluesky Safety account in a post on November 15, adding that it was triaging the flood of content so that categories such as child abuse media could be removed sooner.

Bluesky also observed that it added more than three million users in the past week.

Many of these users were people who wanted a social media environment that was different from Elon Musk-owned X, with less extremist content and disinformation. Several media platforms, such as the UK’s Guardian, have also said they will pause posting from their official X handles.

Others are migrating to Bluesky even though former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is no longer an active member of the company.

“With this significant influx of users, we’ve also seen increased spam, scam, and trolling activity — you may have seen some of this yourself. Our team is reviewing these accounts, and you can help us by reporting them by clicking the three-dot menu on each post/account,” said the Bluesky Safety account.

Bluesky said it was adding more people to its moderation team in order to handle the developments, but warmly welcomed new users.

However, the rising social media platform is not free of controversy either; Bluesky has been accused by several X users of censoring both conservative voices as well as Palestinians documenting Israeli violence and wartime atrocities.