Karissa is a senior reporter at Engadget, covering Meta, Twitter, TikTok, Snap and all things social media. Her interests include tech policy, internet culture, and all the ways our online activities shape our IRL selves.
, the platform is facing some growing pains. Among them: The influx of new users has opened up new opportunities for scammers and impersonators hoping to capitalize on the attention — and Bluesky ’s lack of a conventional verification system.
have done this for their official accounts. Individuals are also able to verify by using a personal website.to the DNS record associated with their domain. While in some ways it’s a clever solution to verification — only the actual owner of a website would be able to access the DNS record for a domain — it also has a number of drawbacks. It’s a manual process that’s not readily accessible to everyone who might wish to be verified. becomes available again.
Walker estimates he’s spent about 16 hours over the last couple weeks verifying accounts. He has different methods depending on the user, but it often involves communicating with someone from another account officially linked to them, like a company email address. For celebrities, their representatives are often able to confirm their official Bluesky handles.
And widespread impersonation can often lead to bigger problems for a platform like Bluesky. “Sloppy verification is an early signal of broader deception and catnip for organized disinformation actors,” Cornell Tech’s Mantzarlis wrote, noting that Vice President Kamala Harris “at one point had 20 impersonator accounts” on Bluesky even though she’s never had an official presence on the platform.
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