Bluesky tightens moderation and enforcement

Bluesky is going to crack down more heavily on harassment and toxic behavior, marking a harder line on moderation and enforcement across its network. Having solicited feedback from more than 14,000 community members on proposals to change its guidelines, the social platform says it will now give greater weight to fostering constructive conversations and act more decisively when posts or accounts veer into disinformation.

The changes extend beyond policy wording. Bluesky wants to roll out product updates that tell people when they’re close to breaking the rules with a post, offer an optional “zen mode” for more relaxed defaults and nudge users toward more polite discourse by prompting them. The new guidelines also incorporate clearer definitions and carve-outs for protected expression, including journalism and educational settings.

Why Bluesky is cracking down on harmful behavior

Growth brings friction. Since opening up to the public, Bluesky has grappled with the same trade-offs that plague larger platforms: safety versus speech, speed versus accuracy. Pew Research Center surveys regularly find that Americans are divided on whether social networks take down too much or too little content, a divide which makes any policy change fraught.

At the same time, there is a growing regulatory context raising expectations. The European Union’s Digital Services Act and the U.K.’s Online Safety Act have forced platforms towards clearer rules, quicker response times and improved transparency. Bluesky is smaller, and is architecturally different, but users increasingly expect similar protections wherever they go online.

What “more aggressive” might look like in practice

Bluesky already uses safety labels, user-level mutes and blocks and account actions such as the removal of posts or suspension. More aggressive advocacy means faster determinations on harassment, brigading and targeted abuse, as well as a more definite response in the case of repeat infractions. Anticipate more aggressive deployment of labels, clearer policy explanations and faster escalations on high-harm behavior.

It has also invested in composable moderation tools and third-party “labelers” that alert editors on the status of potential content down a custom feed. That strategy — plus an open protocol — enables a set of platform rules by default, with the granularity for users and communities to have more extreme control. The key now is: Can Bluesky apply this baseline fairly, while respecting user choice?

Controversies shaping the shift in Bluesky’s policies

Enforcement actions have repeatedly caused controversy. Critics point out that more recent social media fund-raising campaigns for Palestinians in Gaza, the temporary suspension of horror writer Gretchen Felker-Martin over comments she made about a high-profile political figure and pulled support from other writers and fans were disproportionately dropped. Others say the service has become an ideological echo chamber.

The updated policies from Bluesky also implicitly reiterate prohibitions against sexual content depicting non-consensual activity, whether that activity is real or synthesized. Some users also fretted that this might be the blunt end of a wider crackdown on illustrative or AI-generated content, another area which is a hot-button issue on these game marketplaces and others — see Valve’s handling of Steam Erotic Content and Itch.io for more. A spokesperson for Bluesky said that the company’s position here had not changed: that it was all too much, and without a clear method to ensure airlines would comply with any standards, it looked like they wanted to return to confusion rather than an intensified regulatory push within these specific regimes.

Product nudges and ‘zen mode’ try to cool the heat

Platforms have realized that small design changes can help to meaningfully reduce harm. Internal research at Twitter showed that prompts, which asked users to reconsider potentially offensive replies, prevented a meaningful portion of people from posting or caused them to edit what they were going to say. Meta has claimed that it has seen some reductions in the rates at which hate speech is posted since introducing more friction and improved classifiers. Bluesky’s proposed warnings and nudges are consistent with this evidence base.

The zen mode idea feels like something you would build for people who hate notifications, need a smaller reply surface and more conservative defaults. Those controls can make social spaces generally more sustainable without compromising discovery. The challenge will be presenting these tools to the user in such a way that they are easy to discover and tune, not hidden inside of advanced settings.

Moderation challenges on a global, federated network

Bluesky is built on the AT Protocol, which includes federation and custom feeds. That architecture makes enforcement complicated: the main service can set a baseline, but other servers are free to make their own rules, and users can add their own filters via community labelers. Bluesky’s emphasis on composable moderation in comparison to ActivityPub networks such as Mastodon is intended to integrate network-level safety with user-level freedom.

On one hand, this flexibility can be a strength — if baseline rules are clear and appeal pathways robust. Otherwise, fragmentation could lead to confusion when it comes to what is allowed where — and who is responsible when abuse crosses server boundaries.

What to watch next as Bluesky rolls out changes

Success will depend on clarity and transparency. The Santa Clara Principles are offered as a roadmap by experts: publish enforcement numbers, justify policies in straightforward language, offer appeals that happen relatively quickly and disclose error rates. For a platform that is still relatively early in its growth, investing in these fundamentals could build trust far more quickly than rolling out any shiny new feature.

Bluesky has always promised healthier conversations with better design and some degree of decentralization. Upping enforcement is a healthy move — when the rules are applied evenly, these product nudges thoughtfully executed, and room left for satire, reporting and dissent. The next few months will reveal whether the platform can find such a balance.