As more celebrities and popular influencers join Bluesky, the fast-growing social media service has faced more concerns around impersonation and identity verification.
The Bluesky Security Team aware On Friday the company updated its phishing policy to be “more aggressive,” adding that “phishing and illegally manipulated accounts will be removed.”
The company said it should be able to act on phishing reports more quickly because it has quadrupled the size of its moderation team, although there is still “a large backlog of moderation reports due to the influx of new users.”
Anecdotally, in recent weeks I’ve noticed an increasing number of Bluesky posts asking, “Is this a real person or a parody account?” no definitive answer in the responses. Other users have also started creating their own checklists and badges.
One reason for the confusion: Bluesky lacks a verified user badge like the one popularized on Twitter (now known as X, which in turn replaced the old verification with a paid subscription). Instead, it relies on other signals, such as verified domains in user IDs, to indicate the trustworthiness of an account; For example, you can tell that someone is actually affiliated with Bluesky if their identifier includes the domain “bsky.team.”
On that front, Bluesky also said it is “working behind the scenes to help many high-profile organizations and individuals set up their verified domain identifiers.”
As for parodies and fan accounts, the company said they are allowed, “but must be clearly labeled in both the display name and bio to help others know that the account is unofficial.” And Bluesky said “identity switching” is not allowed, so “if you set up an impersonation account just to gain followers and switch to a different identity that is no longer an impersonation to maintain that account, your account will be deleted.” .
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber said earlier this week that the company could eventually work harder to verify accounts while also allowing other apps or organizations to provide their own verification: “They can choose to trust us, the verification from the Bluesky team, or they could do their own verification.” own.”
Similarly, the Bluesky Safety team concluded their updates by saying: “We also heard your feedback: users want more ways to verify their identity beyond domain verification. We are exploring additional options to improve account verification and hope to share more soon.”