- Bluesky is expanding its moderation team as the platform grows
- New verification and impersonation measures are coming
- Bluesky says it will have more to share about these features soon
Users have flocked to Bluesky, many of them coming from Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter), but while an influx of new users will please the Bluesky team, it comes with its own set of problems, including verification and impersonation.
Now, Bluesky has said it will step up its efforts to make sure the accounts are managed by the people they say they are. The team is apparently “working behind the scenes” to verify organizations and “high-profile individuals,” so that no one is fooled.
Spoofing and verification become a bigger problem the bigger a social network gets: 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 “phishing and squatting accounts will be removed,” and is now quadrupling the size of its moderation team, to help remove users who are not who they say they are, and potentially scam other users.
More to follow
While parody, satire, and fan accounts are allowed on Bluesky, they must be tagged as such, both in the account handle and bio. However, identity jiggling (changing your identity to mislead other users) is not allowed.
Right now we don't know much about how Bluesky's verification process will work (whether verified users will earn badges, for example, or the methods that will be used to verify them), but expect more updates in the near future.
The Bluesky team is asking for feedback on what might work and what might not when it comes to verification. Right now, you can partially verify yourself by attaching a custom domain name to your Bluesky account, but that's not something everyone wants to do.
“With more users joining Bluesky, we know how important it is to identify which accounts are real,” explains Bluesky's new post. “Users deserve to have confidence that the accounts they interact with are authentic.”
