Bluesky Safety

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.

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:

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 🧵

We've been working to comply with a growing number of age assurance laws around the world. For more information on how we approach this work (and specific information regarding impacted regions) read our constantly-updated blog post. bsky.social/about/blog/0...

Texas passed an age assurance law that requires Bluesky to verify the age of users. This law was paused by a judge and then unpaused by an appeals court, so we are preparing to comply. If you saw an age assurance notice today, that's why. Read about the law here: ccianet.org/news/2026/05...

We’ve received questions from users about recent changes to the way the app handles account-level moderation labels. The goal of these changes was to reduce accidental exposure of adult content to minors and those who opt out of this content in their personal moderation settings.

Since May 2025, we've removed 8,526 accounts tied to state-backed influence activity on Bluesky. 4,907 of those takedowns happened in 2026 alone, roughly double the rate we saw in 2025. 1/4 🧵

Last year, Bluesky introduced a strike system to help enforce our Community Guidelines and bring greater precision and consistency to our moderation practices. Here’s how it works. 🧵

We’re aware of a recent increase in automated spam and account compromises on @bsky.app. We’re actively removing violating content, banning violating users, and working to restore impacted accounts to their rightful owners.

Incident report: Earlier this week, our automated moderation system incorrectly labeled ~32,000 accounts as requiring moderator review. Here’s what happened, what we fixed, and the current status. 1/5

An error caused a large number of accounts to be incorrectly "marked for review" by our automated system. This tool is normally used to rapidly respond to mass harassment and spam campaigns. We have removed the incorrect labels and will publish an incident report in the coming days.

If you want to change Bluesky’s default moderation settings, go to your moderation settings on the web - bsky.app/moderation. Apple limits adult-content controls inside iOS apps, so you won’t see those options on the iPhone app itself. 1/2

We're announcing a new partnership with StopNCII.org to prevent non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) from spreading on Bluesky. While NCII hasn't been frequent on our platform, these incidents are devastating for victims and preventing them is a top safety priority. 1/4