And we're back, thank you for your patience!

Hi all, our backend is down and we're not sure why, so if you're receiving errors with appears and reporting, that's why. More updates as we figure out what broke.

some might know how @roost.tools is approaching open safety tool development, but many more may not! @annebdh.bsky.social lays it all out here, including our governance structure, how people can get involved, and how working in the open doesn't mean more abuse! roost.tools/blog/open-by...

We've introduced a new label and associated blocklist: Intolerance. We have also depreciated the Dehumanizing Rhetoric and Discriminatory Language labels in favor of this one, which will capture a broader swath of behavior that users want out of their timelines.

A general reminder that the labels do what they say on the box. There are very few new false positives being added to the MAGA list and most folks are discovering accounts that were labeled months ago that have not yet been discovered.

Just an update here: We're currently going through all the lists and labeled accounts to remove as many false positives as we can detect. This is a slow and tedious process which will likely continue for the next week or so.

A general reminder. We do this for a good reason. Please read: Whitney Philips' "The Oxygen of Amplification"

Looking forward to a great panel tomorrow at the @parispeaceforum.bsky.social Forum, hosted by ROOST President, @camillefrancois.bsky.social. Stay tuned for more! #onlinesafety #AI #AItransparency #opensource #trustandsafety #techforgood

Today’s the last chance to give us your thoughts! Fill out the Skywatch Survey!

Skywatch was mentioned in this week's Connected Places by @laurenshof.online. We're grateful for the mention and for anyone more widely interested in what's currently going on in the ATProto Community and Fediverse, we can't say enough nice things about Laurens' writing! Check it out!

5) If you haven’t yet, please take the Skywatch User Survey! We will run it for another week!

Hi all, a few updates. 1) We have refined the allowlisting of the MAGA label to catch fewer false positives, but the labeling criteria being what it is this will never be perfect. We are working through appeals but also dealing with a significant uptick in legitimate reports.

We all hate surveys but some are actually important and useful. If you are using Skywatch, take 10 minutes to respond and if you are not, why not may I ask?

Do you use Skywatch? Have you previously used Skywatch? Have you heard of Skywatch? If you answered yes to any of these questions, we'd love to hear from you and have put together a short survey. Please fill it out to help us figure out how to better serve our users!

Do you use Skywatch? Have you previously used Skywatch? Have you heard of Skywatch? If you answered yes to any of these questions, we'd love to hear from you and have put together a short survey. Please fill it out to help us figure out how to better serve our users!

Hi all, we are aware of the increase in false positives related to the MAGA label. We are working on adjusting the auto labeling criteria. While we make a good faith effort to handle negation, the label does what it says on the box, and we may miss some uses cases as they become more prevalent.

We should be back up, and it looks like the issue did not prevent reports from coming in. Apologies for any inconvenience.

Skywatch's backend is down today. We're currently troubleshooting, but if you make an report or an appeal, be aware that you may need to repeat the action once we've fixed it.

Look, I'm not interested in debating Jay's post, but you should be pointing out who these people are because @skywatch.blue will absolutely help deal with the problem and @asukafield.xyz will help deal with the problem.

Working on upgrading the language detection tooling to something slightly better in the hopes French speakers don't keep getting got by the "contains-slur" label.

Hi all, we're aware that there is a specific PDS that has been set-up to aggressively spam replies and had managed to evade our labeler. We've resolved the issue and are replaying the last 24 hours of the firehose to label them accordingly.

Hi all: the relative merits of any given article in a source widely understood to be fringe media or a purveyor of disinformation is largely irrelevent, we are labeling based on the quality of the overall site and do not make exceptions.

Are YOU attending #TrustCon 2025? ROOST's Head of Product @julietshen.bsky.social will be participating in several sessions next week, including "Trust the Mods!" a workshop on best practices for content review systems on July 21st at 11:00 am PT. Learn more here: www.trustcon.net/event/0f932a...

We will be reducing the number of labels we offer to just those which do not require substantial moderator input to apply.

We have made the decision to delete the block list associated with the Suspected Inauthentic label. The nature of how lists work on bluesky and the scale of that list (80K+ accounts) was making it difficult to remove accounts from other block lists.

We are pleased to report that this list has been restored!

Hiding behind the labeler: Labeler subscribers who routinely pick fights with other users and then report the other user when they hit back will have their reports muted and may be labeled if their behavior is sufficiently troll like.

If you are looking for the block list associated with the TERF-GC label, please be aware that it has been temporarily been hidden by Bluesky as potentially “violat[ing] our Community Guidelines.” We have of course appealed and hope to restore this service to you in short order.

This person said a mean thing about my political affiliation—e.g., "this person is ranting about liberals" will not result in label action being taken absent behavior which fits one of our label categories.

Hi all, when you make reports to the labeler, please provide context and don't just submit a blank report. This is especially true if you're reporting an account and the reason is non-obvious. Thank you!

Heya Skywatch users! @laelaps.fyi is another great independent labeler, and they’re looking for someone they can pay who can help them clean up some of their documentation. If you’re interested, please check out the form below!

Hi all, we had a bit of an outage last night and through the day due to a rate limiting issue. If we’ve been slow to act on reports it is because we’ve been playing catch up.

We don’t generally cross endorse labelers, but since it is wholly automated, we can recommend @for.shame.wtf, if you’re interested in having folks who follow certain high profile accounts flagged for your consideration.

It's apparently time to remind people that I am not @skymoderationlists.bsky.social (or @skysentry.bsky.social or @skywatch.blue or @automated-lists.bsky.social or literally any other moderation service or moderation list on this website)

We don't know what's up with the #AltGov accounts either, but based on reports know many of you don't want them in your timeline, so we've got a new label for that! As always, it defaults to off, so you have to opt in to using it.

We don't know what's up with the #AltGov accounts either, but based on reports know many of you don't want them in your timeline, so we've got a new label for that! As always, it defaults to off, so you have to opt in to using it.

Hi! Since people are being referred here a lot today, we wanted to reintroduce the labeler! We’re an independent labeling service, which means that we’re separate from Bluesky!

We appreciate your support as we continue to work to make Bluesky safe and enjoyable for our users. 8/8

We can’t get every moderation decision right, which is why we maintain an appeals process. We encourage anyone using Bluesky for fundraising to focus their efforts through authentic accounts that follow our community guidelines. 7/8

Separately, some forms of solicitation for Bluesky users to share their bank account details with unknown third parties may expose users to serious financial and legal risks. While we understand the urgent desire to help, these posts are in violation of our Community Guidelines. 6/8

In other cases, when our moderation team detects bulk networks of accounts working to target Bluesky users and exploit goodwill towards crises, we take action to suspend these accounts. 5/8

When we identify these patterns, through a combination of signals that may not be publicly visible to users, we first provide warnings and opportunities for users to adjust their approach. We suspend accounts as a last resort. 4/8

In some cases, investigations revealed networks where single individuals operate hundreds of accounts engaging in bulk messaging, identical replies across unrelated conversations, and mass following — behaviors that disrupt the platform experience for all users regardless of the underlying cause.

Our moderation team works to protect users by distinguishing genuine advocacy from spam, manipulation, or other patterns that suggest fraud or deception. 2/8

We deeply understand that people in Gaza and other crisis areas need platforms to share their experiences and seek support, and we’re committed to ensuring that they can be heard on Bluesky. 1/8

Skywatch has updated the logic in our tooling to fetch the URL behind url shorteners and evaluate the returned url based on existing labeling criteria. We are not labeling shortened URLs in general and have no intention of doing so at this time.

Please note that while this labeler is not a generalized transphobia labeler, we consider the rights of transgender individuals and right of bodily autonomy to be fundamental human rights and not up for debate.

“In contrast, if you follow more people than follow you, you will probably earn the Follow-Farming label.” This is absolutely not true. We explain a bit about the harms of follow farming here, but it has nothing to do with following / follower ratios. bsky.app/profile/skyw...

This is a gentle reminder that we do not label impersonation accounts. These reports should be directed to @moderation.bsky.app. Thanks!

We had a bit of an outage this past weekend. We think it has been resolved and that posts are being appropriately labeled again, but are monitoring the situation.