Bluesky promises more verification and an “aggressive” approach to impersonation

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As more celebrities and popular influencers join Bluesky, the fast-growing social media service is facing more concerns about impersonation and confirmed identity.

Bluesky Safety Team to publish Friday that the company has updated its impersonation policy to be “more aggressive,” adding that “impersonating accounts and takeovers will be removed.”

The company said it should be able to deal with impersonation reports more quickly because it has quadrupled the size of its moderation team, although there is still a “significant backlog of moderation reports due to the influx of new users.”

Anecdotally, over the past few weeks I’ve noticed an increasing number of Bluesky posts asking, “Is this a real person or a parody account?” With no specific answer in the responses. Other users have also started assembling their own tools Checklists and badges.

One reason for the confusion: Bluesky lacks a verified user badge like the one popular on Twitter (now known as X, which replaced the old verification with a paid subscription program). Instead, it relies on other signals, such as verified domains in users’ handles, to indicate the authenticity of an account — for example, you can tell someone actually belongs to Bluesky if their handle includes the domain “bsky.team.”

On this front, Bluesky also said it is “working behind the scenes to help several prominent organizations and individuals set up verified domain handles.”

As for parodies and fan accounts, the company said they are allowed, “but they must clearly label themselves in both their display name and bio to help others know that the account is not official.” “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 keep that account, your account will be removed,” Plosky said.

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber said earlier this week that the company could eventually do more work to verify accounts while also enabling other apps or organizations to offer their own verification: “They can choose to trust us — Verify the Bluesky team “Or they can do whatever they want.” king.”

Likewise, the Bluesky Safety team concluded its updates by saying: “We’re also listening to your feedback: users want more ways to verify their identity beyond domain verification. We’re exploring additional options to enhance the account verification process, and hope to share more of them soon.”

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