Users of Bluesky are calling for the social media platform to review its content policies as a growing number of accounts allege censorship and suppression of posts related to Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza.
Social media users accuse the platform of disproportionately labelling Palestinian voices as “spam” and suspending accounts sharing footage from Israel’s assaults or fundraising links for those living in the besieged enclave.
Users describe having their accounts wholly shut down, being blocked from creating new accounts, and having features heavily limited after posting about Gaza or making remarks critical of Israel.
“Palestinians in Gaza are facing an unprecedented level of violence and censorship in addition to unstable access to the outside world via the internet,” says a Change.org petition launched earlier this month.
“Bluesky has been contributing to the censorship and human connection through its moderation services,” the petition continues, calling for the platform to “stop IP-blocking Palestinian accounts” and “stop suspending and deleting Palestinian accounts”, among other demands.
New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch
Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on
Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters
Middle East Eye contacted Bluesky for comment, but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
A separate open letter to Bluesky about the “unfair treatment” and “punitive approaches” towards Palestinians says journalists, artists, grandmothers and paediatricians from Gaza have “struggled to keep their accounts” amid deletions and “spam” labels.
We were hoping that this letter to @bsky.app could first be shared by a Gazan, but we were too worried that doing so would get their account deleted so we are sharing first. You can sign on to the letter about the unfair treatment of Gazans on Bluesky here: docs.google.com/document/d/1…
[image or embed]
— Molly Shah (@mommunism.bsky.social) May 24, 2025 at 9:46 PM
The letter concedes that fundraising links and posting patterns from Palestinians in Gaza “may trigger some … internal automated spam rules”, but says the platform has a “greater duty of care in the context of the horrors [Palestinians] are enduring”, and makes a series of suggestions, including providing information about website expectations in Arabic, providing evidence of alleged fraud or scam violations before account suspensions, and investigating accounts that are mass-reporting Palestinians.
“Reports against Palestinians who have broken no community guidelines must be understood as racism, and the accounts that submit those reports should be disregarded in the future,” the letter says.
‘Bluesky is a sellout’
Online allegations of censorship on Bluesky started appearing in late 2024, as hundreds of thousands of users switched to the platform, which was tauted as a liberal alternative to Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) after the US presidential election.
By December, users on platforms such as X and Reddit started posting about “regular” account suspensions for Palestinians and restricted visibility for content supporting Gaza, highlighting what they said was inconsistent application of Bluesky’s moderation policies.
In response, some users accused the company of “selling out” its users, while others suggested that the platform’s democratic image belied biases similar to those seen in other tech firms.
“Bluesky never beating the ‘scratch a liberal & a fascist bleeds’ allegations,” wrote one user.
Bluesky is a platform for liberals who read the NYT & imagine the world is full of ‘kind people’ who say ‘nice things’ & everyone is very ‘tolerant’ & ‘diversity’ is embraced & ‘democracy’ is celebrated.
They don’t want any genocide mucking up the vibe & ruining brunch. https://t.co/LIYaa6fHf1
— Karyn Taylor-Moore (@TaylorMooreK) May 24, 2025
The allegations come amid broader scrutiny of how social media platforms treat Palestinian content.
This is exactly why platforms that claim to be alternatives, are just arms of the same machine…
Shame on you @bluesky
— 👑 Mr D’Arcy 🇵🇸 (@The_One1001) May 24, 2025
In December 2023, Human Rights Watch said that Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, is systematically censoring content about Palestine on their social networks, including the removal of posts and restrictions on hashtags.
TikTok, YouTube and X have faced similar allegations.
