Bluesky is now bigger than ever. But as the social network grows, the platform is facing some challenges. Among them: The influx of new users has opened up new opportunities for scammers and imitators hoping to capitalize on Bluesky’s visibility – and lack of a traditional verification system.
Unlike many of its peers, which offer checkboxes and official badges for government officials, celebrities, and other high-profile accounts, Bluesky takes a more closed approach to verification. Instead of proactively verifying known accounts, the company encourages users to use their own domain name as a handle for “self-verification.”
Bluesky itself does not provide any indication, other than the handle name, that an account has been “verified.” Verified accounts do not have a visual indicator – such as a receipt or badge – that distinguishes them from unverified accounts,
To combat this, some Bluesky users have come up with their own improvised workarounds. Hunter Walker, an investigative reporter for Talking Points Memo and one of the first Bluesky users, proactively verifies journalists, celebrities, and other well-known accounts on his own. So far, he has verified more than 330 people, including New York City representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Flavor Flav, Mark Cuban, and Barbra Streisand.
Walker maintains “starter packs” for journalists and other famous accounts he has verified. Recently, he took it one step further by working with another user to create a labeling service that will add various emojis to the accounts he has verified to make his “verification” more visible. Users who sign up for the service will see 😎 next to celebrities and public figures, and 🌐 next to journalists.
While such efforts may be a temporary solution, Walker will not be able to independently verify all notable accounts on Bluesky. He speculates that other communities, such as university researchers, could perform similar ad hoc verification. But without the help of Bluesky or a third-party identification service, he expects impersonation to remain a problem.
But Bluesky, which currently has only 20 full-time employees, seems reluctant to consider other approaches to verification outside of custom domains. “We’ve worked behind the scenes with official organizations and high-profile individuals such as celebrities and elected officials to get their accounts verified with Bluesky using their website,” Liu said. “By using domains for verification, we want to put verification tools in the hands of every organization, instead of making Bluesky the sole arbiter of who deserves to be verified on the web.”
Bluesky’s hesitation about the role of the verifier is largely understandable. Verification has a long and complicated history on other platforms. On Twitter, the symbol, which was originally created to combat impostors, quickly turned into a status symbol that sometimes causes controversy. On Instagram, verification was often used by fraudsters. Both companies now allow users to buy blue check marks, although both platforms also proactively verify certain types of accounts, such as those belonging to government officials.
