how is bluesky doing in terms of bot-infestation? [ai slop brief]
Bluesky appears to be doing better than X/Twitter on bot control, but it is definitely not bot-free.
A few indicators:
- Bluesky's own 2025 transparency report says spam was the single largest category of user reports, with roughly 2.5 million spam reports. However, the platform also reported removing large numbers of spam, impersonation, and inauthentic-behavior accounts. (TechCrunch)
- Bluesky reported removing thousands of coordinated influence-operation accounts, including state-backed manipulation campaigns. More recently it disclosed removing over 8,500 state-sponsored manipulation accounts. (TechCrunch)
- Academic research on Bluesky generally finds lower toxicity and less misinformation than larger networks, while also noting that suspicious and coordinated accounts do exist and regularly get detected and removed. (ScienceDirect)
The experience seems to vary by who you are:
- Ordinary users often report seeing relatively few bots.
- Larger accounts (thousands of followers) report more spam replies, scam DMs, and engagement-farming accounts.
- Political topics attract significantly more coordinated or suspicious activity than hobbies, science, art, or local-interest communities. (Reddit)
One reason Bluesky feels less overrun than X is that it has some structural advantages:
- Smaller user base (around 41 million accounts as of early 2026). (TechCrunch)
- More aggressive moderation against spam networks. (TechCrunch)
- User-controlled moderation tools and blocklists, which let communities collectively filter spam. (TechCrunch)
That said, there are signs the bot problem is growing as the platform gets larger. Users on Bluesky's own subreddit have recently complained about waves of spam replies, scam messages, and compromised accounts. (Reddit)
A rough qualitative ranking today might be:
| Platform | Bot visibility |
|---|---|
| Bluesky | Low to moderate |
| Threads | Moderate |
| X/Twitter | High |
| Mastodon | Low |
The important caveat is that "bot infestation" can mean two different things:
- obvious spam bots (crypto scams, fake engagement, porn spam), and
- sophisticated political influence accounts that may be partly automated or human-assisted.
Bluesky seems fairly successful against the first category, while the second category remains a challenge for every major social network. (TechCrunch)