As more famous people and popular online personalities start using Bluesky, a rapidly growing social media platform, there have been an increasing number of concerns about fake accounts pretending to be real users. To tackle this issue, the Bluesky Safety team announced on Friday that they are strengthening their rules against impersonation. They will be more proactive in removing accounts that impersonate others or “squat” on usernames.
The company mentioned that they are now able to respond faster to reports of impersonation because they have greatly increased the size of their moderation team, making it four times bigger than before. However, they also acknowledged that there is still a significant number of reports they need to go through because a lot of new users have joined the platform recently.
Lately, I’ve noticed that many people on Bluesky have been asking questions like, “Is this account a real person or just a funny impersonation?” However, the responses are often unclear, leaving many users puzzled. Some users have even started creating their own lists and badges to help identify verified accounts.
One reason for this confusion is that Bluesky does not have a special badge to show that an account is verified, similar to what Twitter (now called X) used to have. Instead, Bluesky lets users know that an account is trustworthy through other signals, such as verified web addresses in their usernames. For example, if someone’s username includes “bsky.team,” it indicates they are genuinely associated with Bluesky.
The platform is also working on helping various organizations and notable individuals set up their verified accounts with official web addresses.
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Regarding parody accounts or fan pages, Bluesky allows them, but they must clearly state in their display name and bio that they are not official accounts. The company also has a rule against “identity churning,” which means if someone creates a fake account to impersonate another person and then changes it to impersonate someone else, that account will be removed.
Bluesky’s CEO, Jay Graber, mentioned earlier this week that they might implement more ways to verify accounts in the future. They are also open to the idea of allowing other applications or organizations to provide their own verification processes. This means that users could choose to trust Bluesky’s verification or rely on other sources.
Finally, the Bluesky Safety team concluded their announcements by saying that they understand users want more options to verify their identity beyond just having a verified web address. They are exploring additional ways to enhance account verification and hope to share more information soon.
