November 21, 2024 at 05:32AM
As BlueSky surpasses 20 million users, cryptocurrency scams are emerging, similar to those on X/Twitter. Threat actors are using misleading posts with AI-generated images and impersonating Meta branding. BlueSky’s decentralized nature complicates moderation, leading to a surge in reports of spam and scams, highlighting significant operational challenges.
**Meeting Takeaways: BlueSky and Emerging Scams**
1. **User Growth and Threat Landscape**:
– BlueSky has recently surpassed 20 million users and continues to grow, attracting both legitimate users and threat actors.
2. **Emergence of Crypto Scams**:
– Cryptocurrency scams have been identified on BlueSky, mirroring similar activities that proliferated on X/Twitter.
– Examples include fraudulent promotions of assets like “MetaChain” and giveaway schemes falsely associated with high-value cryptocurrency offers.
3. **User Feedback and Reporting**:
– Following an influx of users, BlueSky has seen a massive increase in scam-related reports—over 42,000 in a single day, translating to about 3,000 reports per hour.
4. **Challenges of Decentralization**:
– BlueSky’s decentralized model complicates content moderation. While the primary BlueSky platform can manage its own server, third-party instances can operate independently, which makes it difficult to control or moderate potentially harmful content.
5. **Moderation and Safety Efforts**:
– BlueSky is committed to addressing the surge in scam reports and is temporarily ramping up its moderation capacity.
– Users are encouraged to assist in reporting suspicious content via the platform’s interface.
6. **SEO and Content Visibility Issues**:
– Posts from third-party BlueSky instances may be indexed by search engines, enhancing the visibility of suspicious and fraudulent websites, complicating enforcement against scams.
7. **Need for Strategic Solutions**:
– As BlueSky grows, the platform must find effective strategies to manage risks associated with decentralization and mitigate the proliferation of scams, similar to those that emerged on other social media platforms.
This situation highlights the need for ongoing vigilance and proactive engagement from both users and the BlueSky safety team to combat the rise in scams as user numbers continue to climb.