Bluesky Publishes First Transparency Report for 2025
Bluesky released its inaugural full transparency report on January 29, 2026, covering moderation, user growth, legal demands, and other Trust & Safety efforts throughout 2025. The decentralized social network, a competitor to X and Threads, detailed its operations as it expanded significantly during the year
The platform grew nearly 60%, from 25.94 million to 41.41 million users, including accounts on Bluesky’s infrastructure and federated Personal Data Servers via the AT Protocol. Activity surged, with users creating 1.41 billion posts – 61% of all posts ever made on Bluesky – and sharing 235 million media items, representing 62% of total media posts to date.
User-submitted moderation reports increased 54% from 6.48 million in 2024 to 9.97 million in 2025, submitted by approximately 1.24 million users (about 3% of the base). Top categories included misleading content (43.73%, largely spam), harassment (19.93%), and sexual content (13.54%). Despite the rise, reports per 1,000 monthly active users declined 50.9% from January to December, reflecting improved proactive measures. A reply-filtering system reduced anti-social behavior reports by 79% by deprioritizing toxic replies behind an extra click.
Bluesky took down 2.44 million violating items in 2025, including 2.08 million accounts (up 104% year-over-year) and applied 16.49 million labels (up 200%), primarily for adult or suggestive content. Automated systems flagged 2.54 million potential violations. The company removed 3,619 accounts for suspected influence operations, mostly linked to Russia. Legal requests rose fivefold, from 238 in 2024 to 1,470 in 2025, from law enforcement, regulators, and legal representatives.
Bluesky emphasized a human-centered moderation approach, combining automated detection for spam and child exploitation with human review for nuanced issues like harassment. The platform noted success in reducing problematic content density despite rapid growth. While this may have to change as the platform grows further – which seems more and more likely, given its constant expansion – the current system seems to be effective in curbing spam and bot accounts.
