The social media platform Bluesky recently had an incident where a user created an account with a racial slur as the handle. The Bluesky team quickly removed the account but realized they should have had automated filters in place to prevent such issues. They are now implementing a two-step automated filtering and flagging system for user handles while still involving human moderators. The team acknowledges they were too slow to communicate with the community about the incident and are working to improve their Trust and Safety team and communication processes going forward. They are committed to learning from this mistake and building a safer and more resilient social media platform over time.
Previous post about this topic https://beehaw.org/post/2152596
Bluesky allowed people to include the n-word in their usernames | Engadget
Bluesky, a decentralized social network, allowed users to register usernames containing the n-word. When reports surfaced about a user with the racial slur in their name, Bluesky took 40 minutes to remove the account but did not publicly apologize. A LinkedIn post criticized Bluesky for failing to filter offensive terms from the start and for not addressing its anti-blackness problem. Bluesky later claimed it had invested in moderation systems but the oversight highlighted ongoing issues considering Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey backs the startup. The fact that Bluesky allowed such an obvious racial slur shows it was unprepared to moderate a social network effectively.
Companies show what they care about by what problems they choose to focus on, or not. If you build a Twitter competitor and you don’t invest in community safety from the start, you’re showing what you value 🤷🏼♂️
I would argue responding within the hour without warning indeed does show they care about the issue at hand.
Building a SaaS is a lot of work and the finer details like username validation can skip thru the cracks, especially when it comes to startups.
You are making out username validation to encompass the entirety of community safety and that’s quite a stretch as well. This wasn’t malicious and they showed they cared by reacting asap and providing a post Morten with steps forward to avoid in the fututeZ
They CLEARLY care. They are just rushing out the door because of Twitter Facebook threads fediverse, etc. competition is only getting more fierce. That isn’t an excuse but an explanation of how these finer details can get missed, especially when they already accomplished them when they did Twitter.
You are taking a small technical hiccup as evidence of their culture as a whole, which is extremely unfair but okay.
For the record I never cared about Twitter and I certainly don’t care about blue sky or whatever it is. There is further nuance whether you choose to see it or not
This isn’t happening in isolation. Bluesky has shown itself to not care about community safety in the past, their plans are (more or less) “allow everything and then try and hide the bad things from people that don’t want to see it”. Naturally, this hasn’t worked at all. (Who could have guessed?)
Not doing the obvious things on community safety is the plan. I guess it’s nice that they are responding in this case, but it takes a bit more than that to regain that trust.
40 minutes. That’s how quick they solved it. To me that sounds like showing what you value.
You treat this as a bug, others treat it as another sign of a lack of forethought on the core of their offering.
If this happened in isolation, people would be forgiving (or wouldn’t care, given how small Bluesky is), but it’s not. Bluesky has a whole theory about moderation and community safety, and half-assing fits with that theory.