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.
