The left-wing alternative to Elon Musk’s X platform is already running into difficulties with its promise to censor “harmful content.”
Bluesky, which has received millions of sign-ups from angry leftists boycotting Elon Musk’s X platform, has admitted that it cannot keep up with the number of moderation and censorship requests from its progressive user base.
In a post from “Bluesky Safety,” the company announced that it was receiving over 3,000 censorship demands per hour, leading to a backlog in its response times.
They explained:
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:
In the past 24 hours, we have received more than 42,000 reports (an all-time high for one day). We’re receiving about 3,000 reports/hour. To put that into context, in all of 2023, we received 360k reports. We’re triaging this large queue so the most harmful content such as CSAM is removed quickly.
With this significant influx of users, we’ve also seen increased spam, scam, and trolling activity — you may have seen some of this yourself. Our team is reviewing these accounts, and you can help us by reporting them by clicking the three-dot menu on each post/account.
We appreciate your patience as we dial our moderation team up to max capacity and bring on new team members to support this load. Your safety is our highest priority, and we’re glad to welcome you to Bluesky!
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:
— Bluesky Safety (@safety.bsky.app) 16 November 2024 at 00:10
Bluesky was originally established in 2019 by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. However, he has since stepped down from its board and encouraged users to stay active on X.
The platform claims to offer users more control over their online experience, though its real appeal for its users lies in its promise to censor content at breakneck speed.
Before Elon Musk bought out Twitter, the company had implemented its own aggressive censorship regime and had purged most conservatives from the platform.
Since the buyout, he has renamed it X and allowed freedom of speech to reign. This, along with the fact that Musk has strongly supported conservative ideas and Donald Trump’s presidential, likely proved a critical factor in his spectacular election victory.
For many Democrats, this is a reality that is too painful to bear. Yet when Bluesky inevitably fails, X will still be standing as the home of freedom of speech.
Ben Kew is a writer and editor. Originally from the UK, he moved to the U.S. to cover Congress for Breitbart News and has since gone on to editorial roles at Human Events, Townhall Media, and Americano Media. He has also written for The Epoch Times, The Western Journal, and The Spectator.
You can email Ben Kew here, and read more of Ben Kew’s articles here.
