Bluesky is stepping up its bid to dethrone X by getting serious about verification and impersonation

Real Hacker StaffDecember 1, 2024

2 2 minutes read

Bluesky is stepping up its bid to dethrone X by getting serious about verification and impersonation

Bluesky is expanding its moderation team as the platform grows
New verification and impersonation measures are coming
Bluesky says it will have more to share on these features soon

Users have been arriving on Bluesky in droves – many moving over from Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) – but while an influx of new users will please the Bluesky team, it does come with its own set of problems, including verification and impersonation.

Now, Bluesky has said it will be stepping up its efforts to make sure accounts are being run by the people they say they are. The team is apparently “working behind the scenes” to get organizations and “high-profile individuals” verified, so no one gets duped.

Impersonation and verification becomes more of a problem the bigger a social network gets: if the President of the United States posts something, you want to be able to be sure it is the President, and not a teenager on the other side of the world.

Bluesky says “impersonation and handle-squatting accounts will be removed”, and it’s now quadrupling the size of its moderation team, to help weed out users who aren’t who they say they are – and potentially scamming other users.

More to follow

Bluesky says it’s committed to keeping users safe (Image credit: Future)

While parody, satire, and fan accounts are permitted on Bluesky, they must be labeled as such – in both the handle and the bio of the account. Identity churning (changing your identity to mislead other users) is not allowed, however.

Right now we don’t know much about how the Bluesky verification process is going to work – whether verified users will get badges, for example, or the methods that will be used to verify them – but expect more updates in the near future.

The Bluesky team is asking for feedback on what might and might not work as far as verification goes. Right now you can partly verify yourself by attaching a custom domain name to your Bluesky account – but that’s not something everyone will want to do.

“With more users joining Bluesky, we know how important it is to identify which accounts are real,” explains the new Bluesky post. “Users deserve confidence that the accounts they interact with are authentic.”

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