Bluesky steps up his attempt to dethrone X by getting serious about authentication and impersonation
- Bluesky is expanding its moderation team as the platform grows
- New verification and imitation measures will be introduced
- Bluesky says it will share more about these features soon
Users have come in Blue sky en masse – many are moving over from Elon Musk’s
Now Bluesky has said that will be the case step up his efforts to ensure accounts are run by the people they say they are. The team apparently works “behind the scenes” to get organizations and “high-profile individuals” verified so that no one is duped.
Impersonation and authentication becomes a bigger problem as a social network grows: if the president of the United States posts something, you want to be sure it’s the president, and not a teenager on the other side of the world .
Bluesky says that “impersonation and handle-squat accounts will be removed,” and is now quadrupling the size of its moderation team, to help users who are not who they say they are – and potentially scam other users.
More to follow
Although parody, satire, and fan accounts are allowed on Bluesky, they must be labeled as such – both in the handle and in the account bio. However, identity churning (changing your identity to mislead other users) is not permitted.
At this point, we don’t know much about how the Bluesky verification process will work – whether verified users will receive badges, for example, or the methods that will be used to authenticate them – but we expect more updates in the near future.
The Bluesky team is asking for feedback on what works and what doesn’t as far as verification goes. Right now you can partially verify yourself by add a custom domain name to your Bluesky account – but that’s not something everyone will want to do.
“As more and more users join Bluesky, we know how important it is to identify which accounts are real,” the new Bluesky post explains. “Users deserve to trust that the accounts they interact with are authentic.”