Image: Edward Perez
Amid feedback from its community, X rival Bluesky has responded with more details about ongoing plans to tackle impersonation and verification on the platform.
As many made the transition to Bluesky, with a particular influx of journalists, researchers, scientists and tech professionals tired of the noise on X, one issue raised its head pretty quickly.
As numbers rose quickly in days after the US election, users were quick to spot that there was a fake Kemi Badenoch account doing the rounds, as well as a BBC news impersonation account, to name a few.
These were quickly dealt with by community reporting and Bluesky moderators, but others sprang up. It became clear that this was an issue that was not going to be remedied by the domain verification option being suggested by the Bluesky team.
Initially, the Bluesky team had offered the ability to use domain verification to authenticate an account and offered the ability to easily purchase a domain name through Bluseky and use as an account handle.
It will continue to do so, but said on Friday (29 November) that it had taken on board user feedback. “Users want more ways to verify their identity beyond domain verification. We’re exploring additional options to enhance account verification, and we hope to share more shortly.”
In a post on Bluesky, the platform’s safety team said: “With more users joining Bluesky, we know how important it is to identify which accounts are real. Users deserve confidence that the accounts they interact with are authentic.”
It proceeded to share new details on its impersonation policy, explaining that it is working behind the scenes to help organisations and high-profile individuals set up their verified domain handles.
Impersonation challenges
On Friday, I chatted with former Twitter director, Edward Perez, who led the civic integrity team there, on this very subject. Perez also sits on the board of directors of the nonpartisan nonprofit OSET Institute, which works to enhance public confidence in elections. Today, he’s an enthusiastic Bluesky advocate, although he has no connection to the platform.
“I think that, particularly at this moment of tremendous growth, it is a good thing,” he said. “It is appropriate that people are at least gently saying to Bluesky, ‘hey, we need to look at verification more carefully’, or beyond that, to actually say, ‘this is really turning into a yellow flag’, because the rate at which new users are coming on is making the possibility and the risk of impersonation much higher than it used to be. It is a real concern.”
In a very community-focused Bluesky team – all the team are active and approachable on Bluseky itself – it is no surprise that the community has been stepping in to support this cause on Bluesky. “It is enough of a concern that you start to see some very novel and, I would say generous activities on the part of users,” says Perez. “The one that comes to mind [is] Hunter Walker, a writer for Talking Points Memo, and a well-regarded and responsible journalist.
“He has personally been creating starter packs of verified journalists and he’s not representing anything more than just literally doing the legwork on every one of these journalistic accounts, because he’s also a journalist, to literally call these people on their cell phone and say, ‘Is this really you? Is this your account?’”.
As we spoke, Walker had around 300 journalists verified but that number has been rapidly increasing. When I personally went to report an impersonation account last night, I spotted that I now have a choice of reporting to Bluesky, or to Hunter himself.
Image: Bluesky
“The fact that this is happening cuts both ways,” says Perez. “On the one hand, you can say how wonderful that Bluesky has the sort of people that care enough about this to do that, a community with generous people like this, journalists that are doing that. On the other hand, that’s not sustainable. It obviously can’t be on the users to do that sort of thing.”
Perez likes that anybody can get a domain and use it as their handle but he adds that “those aren’t sacrosanct either”.
“I mean, that’s simply a way of saying that your domain is your handle, and that’s probably not enough. There needs to be more from Bluesky. I’m not sure what that is, but I definitely do think that this is a current point of vulnerability.”
And sure enough, over the weekend Bluesky also announced it had updated its impersonation policy to be more aggressive. “Impersonation and handle-squatting accounts will be removed,” it said. To this end, it announced it has already increased its moderation team by a factor of four, in part to tackle the impersonation reports that are coming in hard and fast.
“We still have a large backlog of moderation reports due to the influx of new users as we shared previously, though we are making progress,” it said, adding that while parody and fan accounts are permitted on the platform, they must clearly label themselves in both the display name and bio to help others know the account isn’t official. Accounts with only one of these elements will receive an impersonation label.”
It is a space to be watched, but it would certainly appear that the Bluesky team has no intention of letting the verification challenge knock it off its new perch as prime rival to X and Threads.
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