Community in Practice

This month, Blacksky’s Trust and Safety team has been busy. With the launch of Blacksky-Only posts, we’ve also launched our first moderation community project: Peer Moderation. You can read more about what Peer Moderators moderate and what is expected of them in our previous blog.

As the public beta for the mobile app on iOS and Android went live, so did the usage of Blacksky-only posts, which were initially only visible through our web app. This gave us a new perspective on how the community engages with each other and also on what type of moderation needs they have. I hope this blog illustrates that community centered moderation is possible at scale and that context aware moderation can help strengthen communities and keep them healthy.

Blacksky-Only, What’s Happening on That Feed?

The launch of Blacksky-Only posts went very well and what was an interesting find is that we’ve received no reports for content on the Blacksky-Only feed. I’ll get into what I think this means from a community perspective in a second, but this doesn’t mean that there wasn’t any violating content on the feed.

In the month of July, Peer Moderators applied 57 labels. We expect this number to go up for August as Blacksky-Only posts are now more accessible to users with the launch of the public beta for our mobile apps on July 29th. When the public beta launched, a lot of our users became aware of what Peer Moderation was first-hand and understood the responsibility of the task to moderate everything posted in the Blacksky-Only feed.

We saw users sharing information with other users about safety features and teaching each other how to apply labels to Adult Content. This is how the many can make the load lighter for our 15 peer moderators and ensures that they can spend more time looking at posts that violate our other guidelines.

What happened on your feed

July was yet another interesting month with large scale events impacting our moderation. We looked at our Trending Topics, compared them to news directly related to Black and other marginalized folks, and as a result, were able to make suggestions to upticks we saw in moderation. This month we were able to resolve 1462 reports and were able to label 247 posts or accounts.

The Death of Nolan Wells

On July 4th, 18-year-old Nolan Wells went missing after attending an Independence Day party with a group of friends. As soon as pictures of the friend group came online, suspicion grew of foul play. We noticed an uptick of white supremacists selling this idea that Black folks were racist for considering that there could’ve been foul play, who wouldn’t stop harassing people even if more news revealed the suspicion of the case.

21.6% (61 posts) of all labeled content for this month has been labeled Anti-Black Harassment and 23.4% (66 posts) of all labeled content for this month has been labeled Anti-Black Rhetoric or White Supremacy.

When Caitlin Clarke engaged in multiple altercations with WNBA stars (and referees), we saw an uptick in white supremacists coming on Bluesky to engage Black users with Misogynoir and Synthetic Media involving Black women.

10.6% (30 posts) of all labeled content for this month has been labeled Misogynoir and 18% (51 posts) of all labeled content has been labeled Synthetic Media.

Here’s a breakdown of all the other labels we’ve used this month:

About 15.6% of all labeled content (42 posts) were labeled for adult content

About 3.9% of all labeled content (11 posts) were labeled for ableism

3.2% of all labeled content (9 posts) were labeled for violence

2.1% of all labeled content (6 posts) were labeled for doxxing

1.4% of all labeled content (4 posts) were labeled for fatphobia

Thank you for all your support of Blacksky and to our users for trusting us with ensuring that your space stays safe. Next month, I will be exploring Algorithmic Terrorism and using our reports to demonstrate how it takes place on other platforms.

If you want to learn more about what Algorithmic Terrorism entails, please read Social Media as a Prison or stay tuned for the next entry in my blog series about Trust and Safety in which I will be defining the term and engage the notion of having algorithmic choice.