Bluesky to quadruple its moderation team due to surge in new users

Bluesky, the decentralised social media platform positioning itself as a potential rival to Elon Musk’s X, has announced it will quadruple its moderation team.

This move comes as the platform experiences a significant influx of users from X, formerly known as Twitter.

The latest estimates suggest X’s users are now around 588 million by September, a 6 per cent drop compared to April, compared to Bluesky which now has over 20 million people.

“We’re trying to go above what the legal requirements are, because we decided that we wanted to be a safe and welcoming space for a lot of users,” Aaron Rodericks who used to co-led the Trust and Safety team at Twitter and is now leading Bluesky’s team, told the specialist website Platformer.

He added that he had a “very, very long wishlist” of humans, automation, and tooling resources dedicated to moderation.

The team is now expected to go from 25 contract moderators to 100 in order to keep up with the growing amount of new users joining the platform.

Social media platforms have long been criticised for not doing enough to provide effective moderation to mitigate the spread of misinformation, hate speech, and other malicious content, or to safeguard the mental health and safety of users. 

Moderators face significant challenges, including the sheer volume of content, the difficulty of making context-specific judgments, and the backlash from communities when moderation actions are perceived as unfair.

“For some very high-severity policy areas like child safety, we recently made some short-term moderation choices to prioritize recall over precision,” Bluesky’s team said in a post on the platform. 

“This resulted in over-enforcement and temporary suspensions for multiple users. We have reinstated accounts of some users, and are continuing to review appeals,” it added, saying that all users appealing will get a comprehensive review.

A surge of new users for alternative platforms to X

Created by Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, Bluesky became an independent company in 2021.

Since Musk’s acquisition in 2022, Twitter has undergone several controversial changes, including a rebrand as X, tweaks to its algorithm, and the reinstatement of banned accounts.

These changes have led to many users seeking alternative platforms like Mastodon, Threads, or Bluesky, on which users can create custom feeds based on specific topics or interests or a chronological feed.