Bluesky could become target of foreign disinformation, experts warn

washington — Experts on cybersecurity and online foreign influence campaigns are urging social media company Bluesky, whose app has exploded in popularity in recent weeks, to step up moderation to counter potential state-sponsored influence efforts.

Over the past month, Bluesky, a microblogging platform with its roots in Twitter, has seen one of its biggest increases in new user registrations since it was publicly released in February. Over 25 million are now on the platform, close to half of whom joined after the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

Rose Wang, Bluesky’s chief operating officer, said in a recent interview that Bluesky does not intend to push any political ideologies.

“We have no political viewpoint that we are trying to promote,” she said in early December.

Exploiting users’ political leanings

Many who joined Bluesky have cited user experience as one of the reasons for migrating from social media platform X. They also have said they joined the platform after Election Day because they are critics of Elon Musk and President-elect Donald Trump. Some commentators in the U.S. have questioned whether Bluesky is risking becoming an echo chamber of the left.

Some experts contend the platform’s liberal-leaning users could be exploited by foreign propagandists. Joe Bodnar, who tracks foreign influence operations for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told VOA Mandarin that Russian propaganda often appeals to the anti-establishment left in the U.S. on contentious topics, like Gaza, gun violence and America’s global dominance.

“The Kremlin wants to make those arguments even louder,” Bodnar said. “Sometimes that means they play to the left.”

So far, at least three accounts that belong to RT, a Russia-controlled media outlet, have joined Bluesky. Sputnik Brazil is also actively posting on the platform.

VOA Mandarin found that at least two Chinese accounts that belong to state broadcaster CGTN have joined the platform.

Bluesky does not assign verification labels. One way to authenticate an account is for the person or organization to link it to the domain of its official website.

There are at least four other accounts that claim to be Chinese state media outlets, including China Daily, the Global Times and People’s Daily. None of the three publications replied to VOA’s emails inquiring about these accounts’ authenticity.

Additionally, Beijing has played heavily to the Western left on certain global issues. China has consistently called for a ceasefire in Gaza and blamed the West for supporting Israel.

But those familiar with Chinese and Russian state media say the left-leaning user base on Bluesky actually could give Beijing and Moscow a hard time for pushing their narratives.

“Bluesky isn’t the most hospitable place for Russian narratives,” Bodnar said.

Sean Haines, a British national who used to work for Chinese state media outlets, shared similar opinions in a recent blog post about Bluesky.

“With its predominately Western liberal leaning, the platform also will be an uphill challenge for those looking to push overtly nationalistic viewpoints,” he wrote.

Most of the Chinese and Russian state media accounts have only hundreds of followers, with RT en Espanol at the top, with nearly 7,000.

Could ‘decentralization’ be detrimental?

China and Russia have been finding ways to reach the American public through covert disinformation operations on social media. During this year’s election, disinformation campaigns connected to China and Russia promoted claims that cast doubt on the integrity of the voting process.

Similar tactics could soon be coming to Bluesky.

“I don’t think Bluesky is more vulnerable to influence campaigns than X or other social networks,” Jennifer Victoria Scurrell, a researcher on AI-supported influence operations, told VOA Mandarin. But Scurrell, of ETH Zurich’s Center for Security Studies, said Bluesky’s decentralized moderation approach is flawed.

Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, started Bluesky as an internal project to give users more power over moderation. Bluesky then went independent in 2021.

“Our mission is to develop and drive large-scale technologies of open and decentralized public conversation,” the company says on its website.

To do that, Bluesky “decentralized” its moderation authority, giving users tools to customize their experience on the site.

Bluesky offers a universal basic moderation setting for every user, which labels content such as extremism, misinformation, fake accounts and adult content. Users can choose whether to see the content labeled by Bluesky. Users can report to Bluesky content or accounts they believe have violated Bluesky’s guidelines.

On top of that, users get to create their own moderation settings to label or filter out certain content and accounts. Other users can subscribe to these customized settings, should they choose.

Scurrell, who helps test security weaknesses for OpenAI as a contractor, told VOA Mandarin the decentralized approach to moderation could be a double-edged sword.

“Societal values are diverse, contextual and local, which makes decentralized moderation an appealing concept,” she wrote in her replies to VOA.

She warned that outsourcing content moderation to users, though, “raises serious concerns” because the approach would give bad actors the same amount of power as normal users.

“What happens if an entire node is taken over by malicious actors spreading disinformation or manipulative content,” she wrote, or “if the system gets hijacked by an army of bots?”

VOA Mandarin emailed Bluesky a list of detailed questions about its moderation policy against potential foreign influence attempts but did not receive a response.

Experts have urged Bluesky to implement measures to counter potential foreign influence campaigns.

In a recent blog post, Sarah Cook, an independent China watcher and former China director at Freedom House, urged Bluesky to label state media accounts, a practice exercised by many social media companies, so users know of these accounts’ ties to foreign governments.

Eugenio Benincasa, an expert on Chinese cyber threats at ETH Zurich, asserts that studying how Chinese tech companies help Beijing surveil social media platforms and manipulate online discussions can help Bluesky better prepare.

“It is crucial to thoroughly study the evolving influence tactics enabled by tools like public opinion monitoring systems to identify vulnerabilities that may have been overlooked or are emerging, in order to develop effective safeguards,” Benincasa said.
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