Bluesky Quadruples Its Moderators

Bluesky, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's intended open-source spinoff from Twitter, announced Thursday it would be quadrupling the number of moderators.

"We have also quadrupled the size of our moderation team, in part to action impersonation reports more quickly. We still have a large backlog of moderation reports due to the influx of new users as we shared previously, though we are making progress," Bluesky wrote in a thread.

The post followed months after Dorsey's departure from Bluesky's board in May over the social media company's trend toward repeating the same censorship mistakes as Twitter.

"That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope," Dorsey told Pirate Wires at the time. "This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company.

"This is not a protocol that's truly decentralized. It's another app. It's another app that's just kind of following in Twitter's footsteps, but for a different part of the population."

Following Thursday's announcement, many Bluesky users praised the platform for bolstering its moderation team.

"Thank you for all you're doing to keep this site safe," wrote one user, @mommamia.bsky.social, garnering over 700 likes.

Bluesky's thread on Thursday also mentioned that it was working to verify various organizations on the platform and that a policy to stop impersonations was being rolled out. But nowhere in the thread did it mention to what size the moderation team would be quadrupling.

Shortly after Dorsey quit the board of Bluesky and a week before his interview with Pirate Wires, the Silicon Valley tech titan posted on X, "don't depend on corporations to grant you rights. defend them yourself using freedom technology. (you're on one)"

Dorsey followed up on his post, responding to one user who asked how he let the original Twitter get so bad.

Dorsey replied: "i've answered so many times. if it was 'captured' it was by the advertising model and wall st incentives. could not be public like that. pretty basic."

Elon Musk, who bought Twitter and rebranded it as X, replied, "Yup."

While Dorsey attributes much of Twitter's censorship to advertiser pressure, according to the "Twitter Files," it was the result of a "censorship-industrial complex" consisting of the U.S. government, other Big Tech companies, academic institutions, nongovernmental organizations, foundations, for-profit companies, think tanks, and fact-checking companies.

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