Each accounts were eventually deleted, but not before attempting to get me to establish a crypto wallet and a “cloud mining pool” account. Knight and Marx confirmed to us that these accounts didn’t belong to them, and that they’ve been fighting impersonator accounts of themselves for weeks.
They should not the one ones. The tech journalist Sheera Frankel and Molly White, a researcher and cryptocurrency critic, have also experienced people impersonating them on Bluesky, almost certainly to scam people. This tracks with research from Alexios Mantzarlis, the director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, who manually went through the highest 500 Bluesky users by follower count and located that of the 305 accounts belonging to a named person, at the least 74 had been impersonated by at the least one other account.
The platform has needed to suddenly cater to an influx of thousands and thousands of recent users in recent months as people leave X in protest of Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform. Its user base has greater than doubled since September, from 10 million users to over 20 million. This sudden wave of recent users—and the inevitable scammers—means Bluesky continues to be playing catch-up, says White.
“These accounts block me as soon as they’re created, so I don’t initially see them,” Marx says. Each Marx and White describe a frustrating pattern: When one account is taken down, one other one pops up soon after. White says she had experienced an analogous phenomenon on X and TikTok too.
A approach to prove that folks are who they are saying they’re would help. Before Musk took the reins of the platform, employees at X, previously often known as Twitter, verified users equivalent to journalists and politicians, and gave them a blue tick next to their handles so people knew they were coping with credible news sources. After Musk took over, he scrapped the old verification system and offered blue ticks to all paying customers.
The continuing crypto-impersonation scams have raised calls for Bluesky to initiate something just like Twitter’s original verification program. Some users, equivalent to the investigative journalist Hunter Walker, have arrange their very own initiatives to confirm journalists. Nevertheless, users are currently limited within the ways they’ll confirm themselves on the platform. By default, usernames on Bluesky end with the suffix bsky.social. The platform recommends that news organizations and high-profile people confirm their identities by organising their very own web sites as their usernames. For instance, US senators have verified their accounts with the suffix senate.gov. But this system isn’t foolproof. For one, it doesn’t confirm people’s identity—only their affiliation with a specific website.
Bluesky didn’t reply to ’s requests for comment, but the corporate’s safety team posted that the platform had updated its impersonation policy to be more aggressive and would remove impersonation and handle-squatting accounts. The corporate says it has also quadrupled its moderation team to take motion on impersonation reports more quickly. However it appears to be struggling to maintain up. “We still have a big backlog of moderation reports as a result of the influx of recent users as we shared previously, though we’re making progress,” the corporate continued.
Bluesky’s decentralized nature makes kicking out impersonators a trickier problem to unravel. Competitors equivalent to X and Threads depend on centralized teams throughout the company who moderate unwanted content and behavior, equivalent to impersonation. But Bluesky is built on the AT Protocol, a decentralized, open-source technology, which allows users more control over what type of content they see and enables them to construct communities around particular content. Most individuals join to Bluesky Social, the primary social network, whose community guidelines ban impersonation. Nevertheless, Bluesky Social is just certainly one of the services or “clients” that folks can use, and other services have their very own moderation practices and terms.
