Bluesky, the startup that aims to create a decentralized social network to take on Twitter/X, says it has begun developing new security tools to help limit content on the network through automation. Although still in private beta, the company has already made headlines for content moderation issues in recent months after initially failing to ban a member for making death threats and later failing to recognize that some people were creating accounts with racial slurs. usernames.
Now, the company says through a Position from the Bluesky Safety account that it is releasing “more advanced automated tools” designed to flag content that violates the Community Guidelines. Flagged content can then be reviewed by Bluesky’s moderation team to make a final determination.
“We’re going to redo this so mods can control offensive content, spam, etc. without any user seeing it first,” the post notes.
Additionally, the company said it will also add the ability for users to report their own posts for mislabeled content to help the moderation team fix mislabels. Users today can notice whether their posts contain adult content, for example, from the edit screen in Bluesky’s app. Until then, other accounts will be able to report mistags on behalf of users, he says.
Bluesky is also touting the launch of other new features, including user lists (general lists of users) and moderation lists (lists you create to mute or block multiple users at once). Additionally, the ability to sync user moderation preferences across devices and remove mature content tags from non-image posts has been added.
Beyond moderation, Bluesky is building on another feature that X already offers: the ability to control who can reply to your posts. For example, users will soon be able to limit replies to only people they follow or users on a specific list. This is similar to the existing X feature that allows users to limit replies to people they follow, verified accounts, or only those accounts that are mentioned by name, in addition to the default “everyone”.
Despite these changes, some Bluesky users still support the ability to set their accounts to private – a feature they’ve seen an increased need for following Bluesky’s announcement that it will launch a public web interface that will allow uninvited users to ability to browse posts. This led to demand for a private friends-only type of account, similar to X, as many users did not want their posts to be available to the world. Others are calling for the ability to remove followers and urging Bluesky to outright ban accounts that violate the company’s guidelines.
While many users have expressed interest in an X alternative that prioritizes content control and user security, one such competitor, Pebble, found that security measures alone weren’t a selling point. The startup didn’t grow its user base enough and shut down in October.
