Bluesky has an impersonator problem

Both accounts were eventually deleted, but not before they tried to get me to set up a crypto wallet and a “cloud mining pool” account. Knight and Marx confirmed to us that the accounts do not belong to them and that they have been battling accounts impersonating them for weeks.

They’re not the only ones. this new york times Technology reporter Sheila Frankel Researcher and cryptocurrency critic Molly White has also experienced someone impersonating them on Bluesky, most likely for the purpose of scamming. This aligns with research by Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust and Safety Program at Cornell Technology, who Pass manually A survey of the top 500 Bluesky users based on follower count found that of the 305 accounts belonging to a given person, at least 74 were being impersonated by at least one other account.

The platform has had to suddenly cater to 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, 10 million users More than 20 million. A sudden wave of new users and the inevitable scammers mean Bluesky is still playing catch-up, White said.

“These accounts block me as soon as they are created, so I don’t see them initially,” Marx said. Both Marx and White described a frustrating pattern: when one account is deleted, another soon appears. White said she has experienced similar phenomena on X and TikTok.

A way to prove that people are who they say they are would be helpful. Before Musk took the helm of the platform, employees at Dealing with news sources. After Musk took over, he scrapped the old verification system and gave all paying customers a blue tick.

The ongoing cryptocurrency impersonation scam has prompted calls 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 initiatives Verify reporters. However, users are currently limited in how they can authenticate themselves on the platform. By default, usernames on Bluesky end with bsky.social. platform recommend News organizations and celebrities create their own websites as usernames to verify their identities. For example, U.S. Senators have verified their accounts with the suffix senate.gov. But this technique is not foolproof. On the one hand, it does not actually Verify people’s identities—only their affiliation with a specific website.

Lan Tian did not respond MIT Technology Reviewrequest for comment, but the company’s security team release The platform has updated its impersonation policy to be more aggressive and will remove impersonation and squatting accounts. The company said it has also quadrupled the size of its review team to act on counterfeit reports more quickly. But it seems hard to keep up. The company continued: “As we’ve shared previously, we still have a large backlog of review reports due to the influx of new users, although we are making progress.”

The decentralized nature of Bluesky makes driving out impostors a more difficult problem. Competitors such as X and Threads rely on centralized teams within the company to manage unwanted content and behavior, such as counterfeiting. But Bluesky is built on the AT Protocol, a decentralized open source technology that allows users to have more control over the type of content they see and enables them to build communities around specific content. Most people sign up for Bluesky Social, a major social network whose community guidelines prohibit impersonation. However, Bluesky Social is just one of the services or “clients” people can use, and other services have their own moderation practices and terms.