Bluesky released first transparency report this week documenting the actions taken by the Trust & Safety team and the results of other initiatives such as age assurance compliance, monitoring of influence functions, automated flagging and more.
The social media startup — a rival to X and Threads — grew nearly 60% in 2025, from 25.9 million users to 41.2 million, which includes accounts both hosted on Bluesky’s infrastructure and those running their own infrastructure as part of Bluesky’s AT Protocol-based decentralized social network.
Over the past year, users made 1.41 billion posts on the platform, representing 61% of all posts ever made on Bluesky. Of these, 235 million posts contained media, representing 62% of all media posts shared on Bluesky to date.
The company also reported a fivefold increase in legal requests from law enforcement agencies, government regulators and legal representatives in 2025, with 1,470 requests, up from 238 requests in 2024.
While the company has previously shared surveillance reports 2023 and 2024it is the first time it has produced a comprehensive transparency report. The new report also addresses other areas outside of supervision, such as regulatory compliance and account verification information, among others.
User moderation reports increased by 54%
Compared to 2024, when Bluesky saw a 17-fold increase in moderation reports, the company this year reported a 54% increase, from 6.48 million user reports in 2024 to 9.97 million in 2025.
Although the number was up, Bluesky noted that the growth “closely tracked” the 57% increase in users over the same period.
Techcrunch event
Boston, MA
|
June 23, 2026
About 3% of the user base, or 1.24 million users, filed reports in 2025, with the top categories being “misleading” (which includes spam) at 43.73% of the total, “harassment” at 19.93% and sexual content at 13.54%.
A general category of “other” included 22.14% of reports that did not fall into these categories, or others such as violence, child safety, breaking site rules, or self-harm, which accounted for much smaller percentages.
Of the 4.36 million reports in the “misleading” category, spam accounted for 2.49 million reports.
Meanwhile, hate speech accounted for the largest share of the 1.99 million “harassment” reports, with about 55,400 reports. Other areas that saw activity were targeted harassment (about 42,520 reports), trolling (29,500 reports), and doxxing (about 3,170 reports).
However, Bluesky said the majority of “harassment” reports included those that fall into the gray area of anti-social behaviour, which can include rude remarks but don’t fit into other categories such as hate speech.
Most of the reports of sexual content (1.52 million) involved mislabeling, Bluesky says, meaning adult content wasn’t properly tagged with metadata — tags that allow users to control their own viewing experience using Bluesky’s tools.
A smaller number of reports focused on non-consensual personal images (about 7,520), abusive content (about 6,120) and fake (over 2,000).
Reports that focused on violence (24,670 total) were broken down into subcategories such as threats or incitement (about 10,170 reports), glorification of violence (6,630 reports), and extremist content (3,230 reports).
In addition to user reports, Bluesky’s automated system flagged 2.54 million potential breaches.
One area where Bluesky reported success was in reducing daily reports of anti-social behavior on the site, which dropped by 79% after implementing a system that identified toxic responses and reduced their visibility by putting them behind an extra click, similar to what X does.
Bluesky also saw a month-over-month drop in user reports, with reports per 1,000 monthly active users falling 50.9% from January to December.
In addition, Bluesky noted that it removed 3,619 accounts for suspected influencer businesses, likely those operating from Russia.
Increases in takedowns, legal requests
The company said last fall that it was getting more aggressive about moderation and enforcement, and that appears to be true.
Last year, Bluesky removed 2.44 million items in 2025, including accounts and content. In the previous year, Bluesky had removed 66,308 accounts and its automated tools removed 35,842 accounts.
Moderators also removed 6,334 records and automated systems removed 282.
Bluesky also issued 3,192 temporary suspensions in 2025 and 14,659 permanent removals for banning. Most of the permanent suspensions focused on accounts involved in inauthentic behavior, spam networks and impersonation.
However, her report suggests that she favors highlighting content more than initiating users. Last year, Bluesky applied 16.49 million tags to content, a 200% year-over-year increase, while account deletions increased 104% from 1.02 million to 2.08 million. Most of the tags were for adult and suggestive content or nudity.
