X competitor BlueSky quadruples moderation team
The Twitter files revealed in 2022 that, during the COVID pandemic, government was directing the censorship of dissenting public health authorities on social media. Since then, the question of moderation has loomed large.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter and transformed it into X (currently 600 million monthly users), he resolved to do without that sort of moderation. Staff were trimmed accordingly.
But that decision has not gone over well with all constituencies. At Platformer, Casey Newton advises that competitor BlueSky, founded by former Twitter head Jack Dorsey, has gone in the opposite direction:
Bluesky has decided to quadruple the size of its contract workforce of content moderators from 25 to 100, the company told Platformer. The move comes in response to Bluesky’s rapid growth since this month’s US presidential election, which triggered a fresh exodus of users away from Elon Musk’s X and over the weekend took the platform past 22 million total users.
In a sign of Bluesky’s growing vitality, Meta has recently copied a number of features for its larger rival Threads, including custom feeds and letting users view a reverse-chronological feed of posts by accounts they follow by default.
