Bluesky reports nearly 60% growth and rise in legal requests

Social media platform Bluesky released its first comprehensive transparency report this week, detailing its operational scale and user growth as it competes with rival social media platforms X and Threads. In 2025, Bluesky grew nearly 60%, expanding from 25.9 million users to 41.2 million. This includes accounts hosted on Bluesky’s own infrastructure and those running on their own infrastructure as part of the decentralized social network based on the AT Protocol, the decentralized social networking protocol used by Bluesky. In 2025, users published 1.41 billion posts, representing 61% of all posts ever made on the platform. Of those, 235 million contained media, accounting for 62% of all media posts shared to date. Alongside this, Bluesky reported a fivefold increase in legal requests, rising to 1,470 in 2025 from 238 in 2024.

As the user base expanded, user moderation reports rose 54%, growing from 6.48 million in 2024 to 9.97 million in 2025. Bluesky noted that this increase “closely tracked” its 57% user growth rate over the same period. Approximately 3% of the user base, or 1.24 million users, submitted reports in 2025. The primary categories for these reports included:

• misleading: Made up 43.73% of the total (4.36 million reports), with spam accounting for 2.49 million.
• harassment: Accounted for 19.93% of reports (1.99 million), including about 55,400 reports for hate speech, about 42,520 for targeted harassment, 29,500 for trolling, and about 3,170 for doxxing.
• sexual content: Made up 13.54% of reports (1.52 million), including about 7,520 reports for nonconsensual intimate imagery, about 6,120 for abuse content, and over 2,000 for deepfakes.
• other: Accounted for 22.14% of reports. This and other categories covered violence, which saw 24,670 reports (including about 10,170 for threats or incitement, 6,630 for glorification of violence, and 3,230 for extremist content), child safety, and self-harm.

In addition to user flags, Bluesky’s automated systems flagged 2.54 million potential violations. The platform reported a 79% decline in daily reports of antisocial behavior after implementing a system to reduce the visibility of toxic replies, while reports per 1,000 monthly active users declined 50.9% from January to December. In 2025, Bluesky took down 2.44 million items, issuing 3,192 temporary suspensions and 14,659 permanent removals. In 2024, it removed 66,308 accounts (with automated tooling taking down 35,842), while moderators removed 6,334 records and automated systems removed 282.

The report also disclosed that Bluesky removed 3,619 accounts for suspected influence operations, most likely operating from Russia. The data indicates that the platform prefers labeling content over removing accounts; Bluesky applied 16.49 million labels to content in 2025 (up 200% year-over-year), while account takedowns grew 104% from 1.02 million in 2024 to 2.08 million in 2025.

Why it matters

Bluesky’s first comprehensive transparency report provides insight into the platform’s moderation efforts, legal compliance, and growth metrics as it scales against competitors like X and Threads.