Tech
Bluesky issues its first transparency report, noting rise in user reports and legal demands
Bluesky released its first transparency report this week documenting the actions taken by its Trust & Safety team and the results of other initiatives, like age-assurance compliance, monitoring of influence operations, automated labeling, and more.
The social media startup — a rival to X and Threads — grew nearly 60% in 2025, from 25.9 million users to 41.2 million, which includes accounts hosted both on Bluesky’s own infrastructure and those running their own infrastructure as part of the decentralized social network based on Bluesky’s AT Protocol.
During the past year, users made 1.41 billion posts on the platform, which represented 61% of all posts ever made on Bluesky. Of those, 235 million posts contained media, accounting for 62% of all media posts shared on Bluesky to date.
The company also reported a fivefold increase in legal requests from law enforcement agencies, government regulators, and legal representatives in 2025, with 1,470 requests, up from 238 requests in 2024.
While the company previously shared moderation reports in 2023 and 2024, this is the first time it’s put together a comprehensive transparency report. The new report tackles other areas outside of moderation, like regulatory compliance and account verification information, among other things.
Moderation reports from users jump 54%
Compared with 2024, when Bluesky saw a 17x increase in moderation reports, the company this year reported a 54% increase, going from 6.48 million user reports in 2024 to 9.97 million in 2025.
Though the number jumped, Bluesky noted that the growth “closely tracked” its 57% user growth that occurred over the same period.
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Around 3% of the user base, or 1.24 million users, submitted reports in 2025, with the top categories being “misleading” (which includes spam) at 43.73% of the total, “harassment” at 19.93%, and sexual content at 13.54%.
A catch-all “other” category included 22.14% of the reports that didn’t fall under these categories, or others like violence, child safety, breaking site rules, or self-harm, which accounted for much smaller percentages.
Within the “misleading” category’s 4.36 million reports, spam accounted for 2.49 million reports.
Meanwhile, hate speech accounted for the largest share of the 1.99 million “harassment” reports, with about 55,400 reports. Other areas that saw activity included targeted harassment (about 42,520 reports), trolling (29,500 reports), and doxxing (about 3,170 reports).
However, Bluesky said that the majority of “harassment” reports included those that fell into the gray area of antisocial behavior, which may include rude remarks, but didn’t fit into the other categories, like hate speech.
Most of the sexual content reports (1.52 million) concerned mislabeling, Bluesky says, meaning that adult content was not properly marked with metadata — tags that allow users to control their own moderation experience using Bluesky’s tools.
A smaller number of reports focused on nonconsensual intimate imagery (about 7,520), abuse content (about 6,120), and deepfakes (over 2,000).
Reports focused on violence (24,670 in total) were broken down into subcategories like threats or incitement (about 10,170 reports), glorification of violence (6,630 reports), and extremist content (3,230 reports).
In addition to user reports, Bluesky’s automated system flagged 2.54 million potential violations.
One area where Bluesky reported success involved a decline in daily reports of antisocial behavior on the site, which dropped 79% after the implementation of a system that identified toxic replies and reduced their visibility by putting them behind an extra click, similar to what X does.
Bluesky also saw a drop in user reports month-over-month, with reports per 1,000 monthly active users declining 50.9% from January to December.
Outside of moderation, Bluesky noted it removed 3,619 accounts for suspected influence operations, most likely those operating from Russia.
Increases in takedowns, legal requests
The company said last fall it was getting more aggressive about its moderation and enforcement, and that appears to be true.
Last year, Bluesky took down 2.44 million items in 2025, including accounts and content. The year prior, Bluesky had taken down 66,308 accounts, and its automated tooling took down 35,842 accounts.
Moderators also took down 6,334 records, and automated systems removed 282.
Bluesky also issued 3,192 temporary suspensions in 2025, and 14,659 permanent removals for ban evasion. Most of the permanent suspensions were focused on accounts engaging in inauthentic behavior, spam networks, and impersonation.
However, its report suggests that it prefers labeling content more than it does booting out users. Last year, Bluesky applied 16.49 million labels to content, up 200% year-over-year, while account takedown grew 104% from 1.02 million to 2.08 million. Most of the labeling involved adult and suggestive content or nudity.
Tech
Tesla brings its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston
Tesla is expanding its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston, according to a social media post from the company.
The post says simply that “Robotaxi is now rolling out in Dallas & Houston 🤠” and includes a 14-second video showing Tesla vehicles driving without human monitors or drivers in the front seat.
The company now offers robotaxi service in three cities, all of them in Texas, after launching in Austin last year and starting to offer rides without safety drivers in January 2026. In a February filing, Tesla said that its Austin robotaxis have been involved in 14 crashes since launch.
It also offers a more limited ride service with human drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Tesla may not be running many vehicles in either of these new markets yet, with crowdsourced data on the Robotaxi Tracker website only registering a single vehicle in each city (compared to 46 active vehicles logged in Austin).
Tech
Netflix plans to add a vertical video feed, use AI for recommendations
Netflix is going to launch a TikTok-like vertical video feed within its apps this month, and plans to use AI broadly for content creation and recommendations, the company said on Thursday.
Netflix has been testing a vertical video feed since last year. The short video feature could aid users with discovering video podcasts, along with the current slate of shows and movies. The company is also leaning more into using AI for recommendations after launching a ChatGPT-powered search feature last year.
“We have been in personalization and recommendation for two decades, but we still see tremendous room to make it better by leveraging newer technologies,” Netflix co-CEO Gregory Peters said during the company’s first-quarter conference call. “Recommendation systems based on new model architectures not only improve current personalization but also let us iterate and improve more quickly — adding support for different content types much more efficiently.”
Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said he sees AI tools improving the entire content creation process. “In general, we expect GenAI to make content better; better tools, better processes […] It takes a great artist to make great art, and AI won’t change that. But AI will give those artists better tools to bring those visions to life,” he said.
Last month, Netflix bought Ben Affleck’s AI creation company InterPositive, which, Sarandos said, has garnered interest from creators.
“With our acquisition of InterPositive, we think it accelerates our GenAI capability because it is proprietary technology created specifically for filmmakers and filmmaking, different from other GenAI video applications. While our ownership of InterPositive is very new, we have generated interest with creators who have spent time with the tools, and we are seeing momentum build around adoption,” he noted.
Netflix also mentioned that it wants to use AI to improve its ad suite, and allow for new formats and customization to get better returns. The company expects to generate ad revenue of $3 billion this year.
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Netflix reported revenue of $12.25 billion in Q1 2026, up 16.2% year-year-year, and said profit jumped 83% to $5.28 billion. Alongside the first-quarter results, Netflix said its co-founder and chair, Reed Hastings, is leaving the company’s board this summer.
Notably, the company hiked subscription prices in the U.S. late last month, which could have a positive impact next quarter. The company said it ended 2025 with 325 million paying subscribers.
Tech
Bluesky confirms DDoS attack is cause of continued app outages
Bluesky’s website and app are still struggling on Friday after experiencing service interruptions that chief operating officer Rose Wang attributed to an ongoing cyberattack.
On Thursday evening, the social media company confirmed that a “sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack” was to blame for the issues, which had originally started on April 15 at around 8:40 p.m. ET.
Distributed denial-of-service attacks often involve pummeling apps or websites with large amounts of junk web traffic aimed at overloading and knocking its servers offline. While these kinds of cyberattacks do not involve intrusions into a company’s systems, these incidents can still be disruptive to both the company and its users.
In a post on the Bluesky account, the company shared the cause of the problem and noted that the attack was “impacting our operations, with users experiencing intermittent interruptions in service for their feeds, notifications, threads, and search.”
Bluesky said that it has not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private data, however.
When originally reached for comment on Thursday, Bluesky only pointed us to the status.bsky.app page and account (@status.bsky.app) for updates. The company did not provide an estimated time for a fix.
The network’s status page is currently not working, however.
Bluesky said it will provide another update on the status of the attack and its mitigation by 1 p.m. ET on Friday.
Because the outages are intermittent, the Bluesky site and app will load at times, slowly, and other times will display error messages.
For instance, switching to a particular feed within the app could display a message that says, “This feed is currently receiving high traffic and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. Message from server: Rate Limit Exceeded.”
Popular feeds like Discover or the official Bluesky Team’s feed often see this problem, even as users’ own personal feeds are functional.
Other times, like when trying to visit a user’s profile, the site will display an error message, forcing you to refresh and try again.
Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold remarked around 3:46 a.m. ET on Wednesday, “oof, our services are getting hit pretty hard tonight.”
Notably, the service disruptions are impacting Bluesky, but other communities, like Blacksky, that run their own infrastructure on the underlying protocol that powers the decentralized social network, are still functioning.
Blacksky’s team told TechCrunch that the Bluesky outage has led to a “significant spike” in migration requests from Bluesky users over the past 12 hours, as users, devs, and other ATmosphere founders like Sebastian at Eurosky have been promoting its services.
It was clear that Bluesky’s team was in a hectic state this week while facing these issues, as one message on its status page had a typo: ” investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos [sic].”
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