Alcatraz, salad, and Bluesky spam
In which a set of repurposed Bluesky accounts spams the platform with news links and plagiarized photographs of food and California
In spring 2026, a multitude of Bluesky accounts began prolifically posting photographs of various locations near San Francisco, including the three strangely similar posts about Alcatraz featured in the collage above. At first glance, any of the posts in question could theoretically have been posted by a real person who happened to be wandering around California, but numerous problems emerge upon closer inspection. For one thing, the images are plagiarized, with most having appeared on TikTok months or years prior to being posted on Bluesky. Additionally, multiple pieces of evidence indicate that many of the Bluesky accounts posting the stolen photos are themselves stolen.
To find additional accounts of this sort, searches for “San Francisco” and a handful of other recurring terms were performed using the Bluesky API. These search results were then filtered to English-language posts containing four images and no alt text, which were then manually inspected to determine further shared characteristics of the accounts in the network and the content they post. Unfortunately, the Bluesky search feature currently provides no means of filtering search results up front to only those posts containing images; such a feature would have made the data gathering process for this project more efficient, in addition to having other obvious uses.
This spam network consists of at least 22 Bluesky accounts with creation dates ranging from December 2023, when Bluesky was still an invitation-only platform, through February 2026. Every account in the network has a traditionally female display name, and none of the display names match the accounts’ handles. Despite the age of some of the accounts, their posting histories appear to be relatively minimal, with none of the accounts having posted more than a few dozen times.
Each of the accounts in the spam network has posted at least one Bluesky post with multiple plagiarized photographs attached. The photos fall into two general categories: images of food, and outdoor scenes from California, generally in the vicinity of San Francisco. Google reverse image searches reveal that most (and possibly all) of these images were previously posted on Tiktok. Some of the spam accounts copy entire videos from TikTok as well.
Eighteen of the 22 accounts in the spam network were created months or years prior to their first visible post, which for most of the accounts is a post containing multiple plagiarized photographs. Three of the remaining accounts have a handful of early posts followed by one or more image posts after a lengthy pause. The final account (talostecnologia.bsky.social) was created too recently for a significant gap in posting activity to exist.
Although all 22 spam accounts post exclusively in English at present, it wasn’t always so; at least three of the spam accounts (jorgingq.bsky.social, brokenfvm.bsky.social, and giragirac.bsky.social, the latter of which was created during Bluesky’s invitation-only period) posted in other languages around the time they were initially created. Wayback Machine archives for the three accounts indicate that they had different display names and avatars at the time of these early posts. This makeover suggests that the accounts were hijacked, sold, or otherwise transferred and subsequently repurposed.
In addition to the numerous plagiarized photographs, the accounts in this spam network also regularly post links to major news sites from multiple countries. The most frequently linked sites are Reuters, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and The Washington Post. While most of the sites linked by the network have a left-leaning or centrist bias, the right-leaning New York Post turns up periodically as well.
The accounts in the spam network also periodically repost other Bluesky accounts, primarily those belonging to media organizations, various liberal influencers, and anti-Trump Republicans. The most frequently reposted users are Aaron Rupar, Ron Filipkowski, Forbes, The Tennessee Holler, and George Conway.
It is presently unclear what the ultimate purpose of these spam accounts is; while it is possible that amplifying various liberal and liberal-adjacent influencers and sharing news stories is the goal, it would also be unsurprising if the network’s current activity is merely an effort to build an audience for unrelated future content. Time may, or may not, reveal further information.