Both accounts were eventually deleted, but before that I was prompted to set up a cryptocurrency wallet and a “cloud mining pool” account. Knight and Marx acknowledged that the accounts were not theirs and that they had been battling accounts impersonating them for weeks.
They’re not alone. New York Times technology journalist Sheila Frankel and researcher and cryptocurrency commentator Molly White have also experienced people using Blue Sky to impersonate and commit fraud. That’s according to research by Alexios Mantsalis, director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech. He manually researched the top 500 Bluesky users by number of followers and found that at least 305 accounts belonged to a specific person. 74 was impersonated by at least one other account.
The platform has suddenly had to deal with an influx of millions of new users in recent months as people left X in protest of Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform. Its user base has more than doubled since September, from 10 million to over 20 million. This sudden wave of new users, and the inevitable increase in scammers, means Bluesky is still playing catch-up, White said.
“These accounts are blocked as soon as they are created, so you don’t see them initially,” Marx says. Both Marx and White describe a frustrating pattern in which when one account is deleted, another quickly pops up. White said she experienced a similar phenomenon with X and TikTok.
A way for people to prove who they say they are will help. Before Mr. Musk took the reins of the platform, employees at Company X, formerly known as Twitter, authenticated users such as journalists and politicians so people knew they were dealing with a trusted news source. It had a blue checkmark next to the handle. After Musk took over, the company scrapped its old verification system and offered a blue tick to all paying customers.
As cryptocurrency impersonation scams continue, calls are growing for Bluesky to launch a program similar to Twitter’s original verification program. Some users, such as investigative journalist Hunter Walker, have launched their own efforts to verify journalists. However, there are currently limited ways for users to verify their identity on the platform. By default, Bluesky usernames end with the suffix bsky.social. The platform encourages news organizations and celebrities to verify their identity by setting their website as their username. For example, U.S. senators authenticate their accounts with the suffix senate.gov. However, this technique is not foolproof. First, it doesn’t actually verify your identity, only your relationship with a particular website.
Bluesky did not respond to MIT Technology Review’s request for comment, but its safety team posted that the platform will update its impersonation policy more aggressively and remove impersonation and handle-squashing accounts. The company also said it has quadrupled its moderation team to respond more quickly to impersonation reports. But they seem to be struggling to maintain it. “As we previously shared, progress is being made, although there is still a large backlog of data in moderation reports due to the influx of new users,” the company continued.
The decentralized nature of Bluesky makes chasing out impersonators a difficult problem to solve. Competitors like X and Threads rely on centralized in-house teams to manage unwanted content and behavior, such as impersonation. However, Bluesky is built on the AT Protocol, a decentralized open source technology that gives users more control over the type of content they see and allows them to create communities around specific content. You will be able to build. Most people are registered with Bluesky Social, a major social network whose community guidelines prohibit impersonation. However, Bluesky Social is only one service or “client” that people may use, and other services have their own moderation practices and terms.