By ALI SWENSON and BARARA ORTUTAY
Bluesky's user base has skyrocketed for the reason that US presidential election, largely resulting from people taking refuge from Elon Musk's metas threads and their algorithms.
But with growth comes growing pains. It's not only human users flocking to Bluesky, but additionally bots, including those designed to create partisan divisions or redirect users to junk web sites.
The exploding user base – now surpassed 25 million – is the most important test yet for a comparatively young platform that has pitched itself as a social media alternative free from the issues of its competitors. According to research firm Similarweb, Bluesky added 7.6 million monthly lively app users on iOS and Android in November, up 295.4% since October. There were also 56.2 million desktop and mobile web visits throughout the same period, a 189% increase from October.
In addition to the US elections, Bluesky also got a lift when X was briefly banned in Brazil.
“They've achieved this surge in attention and have crossed the threshold where it's now worth flooding the platform with spam,” said Laura Edelson, an assistant professor of computer science at Northeastern University and a member of Issue One's Council on Responsible Social Media. “But they don’t have the cash flow, they don’t have the established team that would have a bigger platform, so they have to do everything very, very quickly.”
To accommodate the expansion of its small staff, Bluesky initially operated by invitation only until it opened to the general public in February. This period gave the location time to develop moderation tools and other special features attract recent userscorresponding to “starter packs” that provide lists of thematically curated feeds. Meta recently announced that it could be testing the same feature.
Compared to larger players like Metas Platforms or X, Bluesky has a “completely different” value system, said Claire Wardle, a professor at Cornell University and an authority on misinformation. This includes giving users more control over their experience.
“The first generation of social media platforms connected the world but ultimately consolidated power in the hands of a few companies and their executives.” Bluesky said in his blog in March. “Our online experience doesn’t have to depend on billionaires making unilateral decisions about what we see. With an open social network like Bluesky, you can design your own experience.”
Because of this mindset, Bluesky has achieved an underdog status that pulls users who’ve grown bored with the large players.
“People had the idea that it would be a different kind of social network,” Wardle said. “But the truth is, when there are a lot of people in one place and there is attention, that means it is in other people’s interests to use bots to create information that is consistent with their perspective.”
There is little data to assist quantify the rise of impersonator accounts, artificial intelligence-powered networks, and other potentially harmful content on Bluesky. But in recent weeks, users have began reporting large numbers of apparent AI bots following them. Publishing plagiarized articles or seemingly automated divisive comments in answers.
Lion Cassens, a Bluesky user and graduate student within the Netherlands, by accident found such a network – a gaggle of German-speaking accounts with similar bios and AI-generated profile pictures posted in replies to 3 German newspapers.
“I noticed some strange responses to a news story from the German newspaper Die Ziet,” he said in an email to The Associated Press. “I have great confidence in the moderation mechanism on Bluesky, especially compared to Twitter since the layoffs and because of Musk's more radical stance on free speech. But AI bots pose a huge challenge as they will only improve. I hope social media can keep up.”
Cassens said the bots' messages have been relatively harmless to date, but he is worried about how they might be used to mislead in the long run.
There are also signs that foreign disinformation narratives have found their technique to Bluesky. Disinformation research group Alethea pointed to a low-profile post containing a false claim about ABC News that was shared on Russian Telegram channels.
Copycat accounts present one other challenge. In late November, Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, found that 44% of the 100 most-followed named people on Bluesky had no less than one duplicate account impersonating them. Two weeks later, Mantzarlis said Bluesky had removed about two-thirds of the duplicate accounts originally discovered – an indication that the location was aware of the issue and was attempting to fix it.
The company didn’t reply to multiple requests for comment for this story.
While the challenges are usually not yet on the dimensions faced by other platforms, Bluesky is at a “crossroads,” said Edward Perez, a board member of the nonpartisan nonprofit OSET Institute who previously led Twitter's civic integrity team.
“Whether BlueSky likes it or not, it is getting dragged into the real world,” Perez said, noting that the corporate must quickly prioritize threats and work to mitigate them if it desires to proceed to grow.
However, disinformation and bots won’t be the one challenges facing Bluesky in the approaching months and years. As a text-based social network, its entire premise is falling out of favor with younger generations. For example, a recent Pew Research Center survey found that only 17% of American teenagers used X, in comparison with 23% in 2022. For teenagers and young adults, TikTok, Instagram and other visually focused platforms are the places to go.
Political polarization also stands in the way in which of Bluesky ever reaching the scale of TikTok, Instagram and even X.
“Bluesky isn’t trying to be all things to all people,” Wardle said, adding that the times of Facebook or Instagram coming along and “trying to make everyone happy” are probably over. Social platforms are increasingly fragmented along political lines, and when this isn’t the case – see Meta's platforms – the businesses behind them are actively working to de-emphasize political content and messaging.
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