As more celebrities and popular influencers join Bluesky, the fast-growing social media service has been facing increasing concerns about impersonation and verified identities.
The Bluesky Safety team posted Friday that the company has revised its impersonation policy to be “more aggressive,” adding that “impersonation and squatting accounts will be removed.”
The company said it should be able to process impersonation reports much faster because it has quadrupled the size of its testing team, although “there are still a lot of testing reports due to the influx of new users.”
Needless to say, over the past few weeks I’ve seen an increasing number of Bluesky posts asking, “Is this a real person or a parody account?” without direct response to the responses. Some users have also started integrating their own checklists and badges.
One reason for the confusion: Bluesky does not have a verified user badge like the one popularized on Twitter (now known as iX, which itself replaced the old verification with a paid subscription). Instead, it relies on other signals, such as verified domains in users’ handles, to show account credibility — for example, you can tell someone is actually a Bluesky ambassador if their handle includes the “bsky.team” domain.
At the time, Bluesky also said he was “working behind the scenes to help many organizations and high-profile individuals set up their own verified domain handles.”
Regarding parodies and fan accounts, the company said they are allowed, “but they must clearly label both the display name and the bio to help others know the account is not legitimate.” And Bluesky said “impersonation” is not allowed, so “if you set up an impersonation account just to get followers and switch to a different identity that you no longer have to impersonate to keep that account, your account will be deleted.”
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber said earlier this week that the company can do more to verify accounts while allowing other apps or organizations to provide their own verification: “They can choose to trust us – the Bluesky team’s verification – or they can do your own.”
Similarly, the Bluesky Safety team concluded their updates by saying, “We’ve heard your feedback again: users are looking for more ways to verify their identity beyond domain authentication. We are exploring other options to improve account verification, and hope to share more soon.”
