As more celebrities and popular influencers join Bluesky, the fast-growing social media service has been facing more concerns around impersonation and verified identity.
The Bluesky Safety team posted Friday that the company has updated its impersonation policy to be “more aggressive,” adding that “impersonation and handle-squatting accounts will be removed.”
The company said it should be able to act on impersonation reports more quickly because it has quadrupled the size of its moderation team, though there’s still “a large backlog of moderation reports due to an influx of new users.”
Anecdotally, over the past few weeks I’ve noticed a growing number of Bluesky posts asking, “Is this a real person or a parody account?” with no definitive answer in the replies. Other users have also begun putting together their own verification lists and badges.
One reason for the confusion: Bluesky lacks a verified user badge like the one popularized on Twitter (now known X, which itself replaced the old verification with a paid subsc programription). Instead, it relies on other signals, like verified domains in user handles, to signal the trustworthiness of an account — for example, you can tell someone is actually affiliated with Bluesky if their handle includes the “bsky.team” domain.
On that front, Bluesky also said it’s “working behind the scenes to help many organizations and high-profile individuals set up their verified domain handles.”
As for parodies and fan accounts, the company said they’re allowed, “but they must clearly label themselves in both the display name and bio to help others know the account isn’t official.” And Bluesky said “identity churning” 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 impersonation to keep that account, your account will be removed.”
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 provide their own verification: “They can choose to trust us — the Bluesky team’s verification — or they could do their own.”
Similarly, the Bluesky Safety team concluded its updates by saying, “We also hear your feedback: users want more ways to verify their identity beyond domain verification. We’re exploring additional options to enhance account verification, and we hope to share more shortly.”