Bluesky just dropped its first comprehensive transparency report, and the numbers tell the story of a startup social network under growing scrutiny. Government legal requests skyrocketed fivefold to 1,470 in 2025, up from just 238 the year prior, while the platform took down 2.44 million items - accounts and content combined - as it works to keep pace with explosive 60% user growth that pushed its network to 41.2 million users.
Bluesky is learning what it means to operate a social network at scale. The company's first transparency report, released this week, lays bare the mounting pressures facing the X and Threads rival as it navigates content moderation, regulatory compliance, and an avalanche of government scrutiny.
The headline number: legal requests from law enforcement agencies, government regulators, and legal representatives jumped from 238 in 2024 to 1,470 in 2025 - a fivefold increase that signals Bluesky's arrival on the radar of authorities worldwide. For a startup that grew nearly 60% last year, from 25.9 million to 41.2 million users, that kind of attention was probably inevitable. But it marks a new chapter for the decentralized platform built on the AT Protocol, which now hosts accounts across both Bluesky's infrastructure and independent servers.
The platform's user base generated 1.41 billion posts in 2025 alone, accounting for 61% of all posts ever made on Bluesky. Of those, 235 million contained media - representing 62% of all media content shared to date. That explosive content creation is fueling both Bluesky's appeal and its moderation headaches.
User reports climbed 54% year-over-year, from 6.48 million in 2024 to 9.97 million in 2025. While that sounds dramatic, Bluesky notes the increase "closely tracked" its 57% user growth over the same period. Still, roughly 3% of the user base - about 1.24 million people - filed reports last year, with the breakdown revealing what's plaguing the platform most.
Spam and misleading content dominated complaints at 43.73% of total reports, followed by harassment at 19.93% and sexual content at 13.54%. Within that "misleading" bucket of 4.36 million reports, spam alone accounted for 2.49 million flags. The harassment category tells a more nuanced story: hate speech led with 55,400 reports, but Bluesky acknowledges most harassment complaints fell into a gray area of "antisocial behavior" - rude remarks that don't quite cross the line into hate speech or targeted harassment.
Bluesky's enforcement actions scaled dramatically alongside user growth. The platform took down 2.44 million items in 2025, a massive jump from the 66,308 accounts removed in 2024. Automated systems contributed significantly, though human moderators still handled 6,334 record removals. The company issued 3,192 temporary suspensions and 14,659 permanent bans for users trying to evade previous removals, with most permanent suspensions targeting inauthentic behavior, spam networks, and impersonation.
But here's where Bluesky's approach diverges from traditional platforms: the company strongly prefers labeling over outright removal. In 2025, Bluesky applied 16.49 million labels to content - up 200% year-over-year - while account takedowns grew 104% from 1.02 million to 2.08 million. Most labels concerned adult content, suggestive material, or nudity, reflecting the platform's philosophy of letting users control their own moderation experience through metadata tags rather than making unilateral removal decisions.
The company's automated systems are also showing results in specific problem areas. Bluesky flagged 2.54 million potential violations through machine detection in 2025, and saw an impressive 79% drop in daily antisocial behavior reports after implementing a system that buries toxic replies behind an extra click - similar to what X does with certain replies. Month-over-month, reports per 1,000 monthly active users fell 50.9% from January to December, suggesting the platform's finding its footing on enforcement.
On the geopolitical front, Bluesky removed 3,619 accounts for suspected influence operations, with most likely originating from Russia according to the report. That's a relatively small number compared to the platform's overall user base, but it shows the startup is actively monitoring for coordinated inauthentic behavior - a problem that's plagued larger social networks for years.
The transparency report marks an evolution for Bluesky, which previously shared more limited moderation reports in 2023 and 2024. This year's document expands beyond content moderation to cover regulatory compliance, account verification, age assurance, and the monitoring of influence operations. It's the kind of comprehensive disclosure that investors, regulators, and users increasingly expect from social platforms operating at scale.
The timing is notable. Bluesky said last fall it was getting more aggressive about moderation and enforcement, and the numbers back that up. The dramatic increase in both takedowns and labels suggests a company that's no longer just focused on growth, but on building sustainable trust and safety operations that can handle the messy realities of running a public social network.
Bluesky's first transparency report reads like a coming-of-age story for a social startup that can no longer fly under the radar. The fivefold jump in government requests signals the platform's crossed a threshold - it's now big enough to matter to regulators, law enforcement, and bad actors alike. The real test will be whether Bluesky's decentralized architecture and labeling-first moderation philosophy can scale alongside its user base, or if the company will eventually face the same impossible tradeoffs that have plagued Meta, X, and every other platform trying to moderate human behavior at internet scale. For now, the numbers suggest a company that's at least trying to be transparent about the mess, even if it hasn't fully figured out how to clean it up.
