Bluesky users have threatened to leave the platform in protest over its reluctance to identify offensive accounts.
Bluesky hasn’t issued an apology for enabling racial slurs to bypass its moderating systems, despite the fact that doing so violates the platform’s community guidelines, which has angered many users, especially Black users.
“Our community guidelines published yesterday reflect our values for a healthy community, and we’re working on becoming better stewards every day,” Bluesky CEO Jay Graber said in a post on Saturday.
Users last week brought attention to an account that had a racial word as its username. Users didn’t flag the account until it had been active for 16 days. The account was deleted by Bluesky the same day.
Bluesky recently amended its list of words that are not permitted to be used as usernames, including insults, expletives, and names of famous people. One user was able to alter their handle to a racial slur hours after the update since the change failed to take into account accounts that already existed.
Users reported that account and questioned how it managed to bypass Bluesky’s filter for prohibited words.
A sizable portion of users threatened to abandon the platform in protest of Bluesky’s errors and lack of remorse for failing to implement a slur filter.
The following day, Bluesky published revisions to its community rules and terms of service.
Users are prohibited from using the site to “break the law or cause harm to others,” according to the community guidelines, the firm stated in a statement. Additionally, users are required to “treat others with respect,” and Bluesky prohibits behaviour that “targets people based on their race, gender, religion, ethnicity, nationality, disability, or sexual orientation.”
