Thank you to the 14,000+ people who shared feedback on our community guidelines! We’re updating our rules for clarity, strengthening enforcement, and introducing product changes for healthier conversations. New guidelines kick in Oct 15. bsky.social/about/blog/0...

Glorifying violence or harm violates Bluesky’s Community Guidelines. We review reports and take action on content that celebrates harm against anyone. Violence has no place in healthy public discourse, and we’re committed to fostering healthy, open conversations

Protecting young people online is a shared responsibility. Here’s how Bluesky is approaching new age assurance laws with pragmatism and flexibility. bsky.social/about/blog/0...

We're launching a new safety feature to help protect you from malicious links shared in messages. This service will warn or block URLs to keep you safer on Bluesky. 1/4

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

We're excited that verification badges have made it easier to quickly recognize authentic accounts, especially in moments of breaking news. Now, we're expanding our roll-out. Notable and authentic accounts can apply for verification or to become a Trusted Verifier via the form linked in our blog.

Lists are a feature that allow users to create groups of accounts, for example, for curation. However, we’ve also seen lists be used for harassment.

1/6 We're seeing an uptick in scams pretending to be Bluesky or @aaron.bsky.team. These scammers are targeting artists via DMs, trying to take you off-app. Our moderation team is reviewing reports of these scammers and will take down their accounts. Here are some important reminders:

Occasionally, groups on Bluesky will coordinate to mass report an account. This may lead our moderators to review the case more quickly, but mass reporting alone doesn’t lead to suspensions. Reports and user behavior are reviewed by moderators, not counted like votes.

Programming note: Bluesky’s moderation email is [email protected]. Moderation emails sent from this domain are authentic. You can also use this email to submit more complex reports that don’t fit in the in-app reporting method.

We’ve invested in cutting down DM spam over the past week, so you should see fewer scammers and spammers in your inbox. Expect more improvements in this area as we build additional tooling. 1/2

@bsky.app joins the fight against child sexual abuse material by becoming a Member of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). The move comes as the ‘insidious spread’ of child sexual abuse imagery reaches record levels across the internet. Read more: www.iwf.org.uk/news-media/n...

Ensuring user safety at scale takes massive resources. That’s why we’re excited to partner with ROOST—helping smaller orgs enhance safety, meet regulations, and compete. More safety, more competition, more user choice.

In 2024, Bluesky grew from 2.9M to 25.9M users. With this growth came anticipated challenges in scaling Trust & Safety, from adding workstreams to adapting to new harms. In our newly published 2024 Moderation Report, we share details on what the year looked like for our Trust & Safety team.

In the past month alone, over 12M people joined Bluesky, with daily active users growing 10x. We received more reports in two days than in all of last year, and have integrated new systems and quadrupled our moderation team to try and keep up. Sometimes, we have to work quickly to correct errors.

1/ With more users joining Bluesky, we know how important it is to identify which accounts are real. Users deserve confidence that the accounts they interact with are authentic. Sharing some details about our impersonation policy 🧵

1/ We're experiencing a huge influx of users, and with that, a predictable uptick in harmful content posted to the network. 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.

We're rolling out an update shortly to email verification to prevent harassment and trolling from throwaway accounts. New users may need to verify their account email before they can create a post. Thanks for your understanding!

Another day at Bluesky, and it looks like growth is not slowing down! Welcome! We’d like to take a moment to share our stance on AI and user data:

Bluesky has grown by over 3M people in the last week — welcome! With every wave of growth naturally comes an increase in moderation reports. Here’s a status report on how the Trust & Safety team is handling it:

This has been a big year for elections globally, and we’re a few days away from the U.S. Presidential election. Here’s how our team, led by @aaron.bsky.team who previously led election integrity efforts at Twitter, is preparing:

This is a big quarter for Trust and Safety here, as we work on a large number of improvements. Here’s a look at our projects in progress, including ban evasion and multi-account detection capabilities, toxicity and spam detection, sending feedback on moderation reports you submit, and more.

📢 1.90 is rolling out now (10/11) We’re publishing a series of blog posts on Trust & Safety efforts at Bluesky. The first in the series covers the features we’re releasing in this version. Read it here: bsky.social/about/blog/0...

📢 App Version 1.90 is rolling out now (1/11) This release is focused on personal moderation controls, and includes a lot of new tools for reducing unwanted attention! Open this thread for more details. 👀

In response to user feedback, we’ve shipped an update to starter packs on Bluesky. Now, you can remove yourself from a starter pack by blocking the creator. If you don't want to be part of a starter pack, block the user and you'll no longer appear on their list.

We also have two safety tooling improvements rolling out now in the latest release (1.87):

Now you can use a starter pack to invite friends and colleagues to Bluesky! Some more details threaded 🧵

In the latest app update, we added the ability to temporarily deactivate your account. This will hide your profile and posts but keep your handle reserved. Take a breather for as long as you need to! Read more about how account deactivation works on Bluesky: 🧵 /1

Direct Messages (DMs) are now available on Bluesky! Learn more about the built-in safety features and how to use them 🧵:

1/4 📸 We want to share an important update about image labeling on Bluesky. Every image posted is initially reviewed by an automated system that checks for adult content, graphic imagery, and more. The system then applies labels to flag sensitive content, which human moderators can review.

Bluesky is built to give users control over their social spaces online. Today, we’re open sourcing Ozone, a tool that lets users collaboratively inspect and label content on the network. Later this week, we’re opening up the ability for users to run their own independent moderation services.

Today, we’re excited to announce Bluesky’s Head of Trust and Safety. Aaron Rodericks, who has over a decade of experience in defending platforms at global scale, is leading our moderation team in cultivating a healthy space for public conversation on Bluesky. Learn more:

Safety is core to social media. Transparency is essential to building trust in moderation efforts, and the data we are providing here is a first step towards full transparency reports. We hope this provides some visibility, and we intend to deliver more granular data and reporting in the future.

Recap thread of some recently released features 🧵: • Thread reply controls • Logged-out Visibility • Hide posts

📢 1.57 Logged-out visibility Next week the Bluesky app and website will enable logged-out viewing. If you dont want Bluesky to show your content, you can select this new option in the Moderation screen. Remember Bluesky is a public network. This setting only adds friction to seeing your posts. 3/4

📢 1.57 Thread Reply Controls When you compose a post, you can now choose who is allowed to reply to your posts. Options include nobody, mentioned users, followed users, and members of lists you’ve created. 2/4

We're stepping up enforcement of the Community Guidelines against spam and automated unsolicited interactions on Bluesky, such as bulk follow/unfollow and other forms of engagement farming. Details threaded: 🧵

We previously shared that we’re releasing a public web view soon so that you can view Bluesky posts without being logged in. The upcoming release will not have the public web view enabled yet, but it will have a tool to opt out of it. More details in this thread 🧵

We’ve been working on some new safety tooling — here’s a status report on what you can expect soon and what we’ve recently released: 🧵

As a reminder, Bluesky is a public social network, so your posts, likes, etc. have always been publicly accessible through the API. We designed Bluesky with the openness of the internet in mind. You can think of your profile as a blog on the internet. For more on data privacy, read our user FAQ:

Exciting news: We’re taking another step to making Bluesky an open network for public conversations. Around the end of this month, we’ll release a public web interface. With this, you’ll be able to view posts on Bluesky without being logged in on an account.

We're rolling out email verification in the latest Bluesky app release (1.52), as part of a larger effort to improve account security and authentication on the network. Update and verify your email in Settings. In the coming days, you'll also receive an in-app prompt to verify your email.

Update: App Passwords no longer have access to your invite codes, to ensure that third-party tools cannot claim your invite codes without your awareness. Please only login to third-party tools that you trust, and always use an App Password (a temporary solution until we implement OAuth). 🧵

Let’s talk about how we use invite trees to track spam bots on Bluesky 🧵:

Be wary of offers of Bluesky invites for sale posted here or on other platforms! We highly discourage invite sales and can’t verify their authenticity.

Starting in Version 1.46, users can submit reports for lists.

Update your app to Version 1.44 to now attach content warnings to your own post. More information in the below post:

Tip: You can enable adult content in Moderation > Content Filtering via the desktop app at https://bsky.app/. (You can't change this directly in mobile due to a restriction from the App Store.) We're also working on improving syncing for your content filtering preferences between mobile & desktop.

Spam lowers the quality of conversation for everyone on the network. We may label posts or accounts as spam, take down the accounts, and/or disable invites to that account’s tree to proactively prevent platform manipulation. Here are some spammy behaviors to avoid:

On July 12, an incident led to the implementation of a combined automated and human filtering system for user handles. This letter to the community describes what happened and what we’re going to do moving forward: https://blueskyweb.xyz/reports/2023-07-22-letter