Twitter rival Bluesky faces backlash for allowing usernames with racial slurs

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey-backed Bluesky has come under fire for removing numerous racist, ableist, and transphobic slurs from its list of flagged words in a controversial update last week.

According to TechCrunch, several users are angry that Bluesky hasn't apologised for allowing racial slurs to pass through its moderation tools even though they violate the platform's community guidelines.

"Our community guidelines published yesterday reflect our values for a healthy community, and we are working on becoming better stewards every day," Bluesky CEO Jay Graber said in a post last week.

Last week, users reported an account with a racial slur as its username.

They had flagged the account after it had been active for 16 days. Bluesky deactivated the account the next day.

"User handles that are slur words are a form of harassment. We’ve deployed a change so that these handles can no longer be created in the app," Bluesky said in a post.

Moreover, the report said that the Twitter rival updated its banned word list, which includes slurs, expletives and celebrity names that cannot be used as usernames when creating a new account.

However, the change did not take existing accounts into account, and one user was able to change their handle to a racial slur hours after the update.

Users reported that account and questioned how it was able to bypass Bluesky's banned words filter, according to the report.

Meanwhile, as Meta launched its Twitter rival Threads on Instagram, Bluesky has announced it has raised $8 million to support its mission and growth.

The company said that it will also offer a paid service that provides custom domains for end users who want to have a unique domain as their handle on the service.

The Twitter competitor raised $8 million in a seed round led by Neo, a community-led firm with partners like Ali Partovi and Suzanne Xie.