Bluesky has a growing problem: fake accounts

On Wednesday afternoon, billionaire activist investor Bill Ackman appeared to post on Bluesky a plan to destroy the burgeoning social media platform. Though the poster turned out to be an impostor, whoever it was so thoroughly captured the long-winded Ackman’s rhetorical style on X, they managed to briefly convince many people—including some high-profile journalists. The fake Ackman account has since been suspended, but there are plenty more just like it.

Take a tour of Bluesky at the time of this writing, and you’ll find several accounts pretending to be special counsel Jack Smith, several fake versions of X CEO Linda Yaccarino, a fraudulent David Hogg, a mock Karine Jean-Pierre, and an illuminati-themed Lenny Kravitz impersonator. A senior journalist at BBC recently had to alert his followers that a BBC Breaking News account was fake, while Ben Stiller struggled to convince people that his account was real. Mark Cuban and Mark Hamill also faced similar issues. 

In the wake of massive growth in a short time—with a staff of “about 20 people” manning the controls, according to CEO Jay Graber—fake accounts are rampant on Bluesky.

For a long time, the platform was doing just fine without verification. Bluesky’s main functions appeared to be cracking jokes with friends and sharing links to each other’s newsletters—anyone impersonating Ackman would’ve obviously been doing so as a means to one or the other ends. Those days, though, are over. With a large-scale migration from X following the election, the app now has more than 21 million users, and daily activity has surged by 500%. Anything that happens on Bluesky now—say, a billionaire proposing to dismantle it—is potentially newsworthy. As the platform hits critical mass, it’s become too big to not have verification.

The blue check marks

Back when X was just a gleam in Elon Musk’s eye, Twitter began verifying accounts in June of 2009. The nascent microblogging site only began doing so after former White Sox manager Tony La Russa sued the company over being impersonated on the platform. Twitter soon introduced an internal process to gauge which users were notable enough to be verified. Those who were—celebrities, journalists, athletes—received a snazzy blue check mark near their name.

Although the purpose of the blue check was to distinguish accounts of varying significance from potential impostors, over time it became seen as a symbol of elitism—mostly among conservatives. After acquiring Twitter in 2022, Elon Musk set out to remove verification from all legacy accounts, and sell blue-check status and high-visibility to users as a premium. (He later quietly restored verification to some of the site’s most influential users, though X still has more than its share of fake accounts.)

In launching its intended Twitter-killer Threads in July 2023, Meta understood the importance of verification. The company had to make sure that the celebrities and brands it hoped to attract would feel as comfortable on Threads as they had on Twitter, pre-Musk. Any users already verified on Instagram would find the telltale badge—also a blue check—automatically imported to their Threads profile. (Those who didn’t yet have one could still apply.)

Although it launched in beta a few months before Threads, Bluesky still has yet to announce any similar system. This week has proven why the company should make it a priority.

Bluesky imposter syndrome

Some of the fakes are technically parodies, like this wannabe Joe Scarborough or this account pretending to be former Obama advisor David Axelrod, both of which have the word ‘parody’ buried deep in their bios. Others are taking advantage of the last vestiges of Bluesky’s Wild West days with the clear aim of deceiving people, for whatever reason.

Bluesky Moderation lists “impersonation” as one of the negative elements users can opt out of encountering. Team members add an “impersonation” label to accounts pretending to be other people without permission, and users have the option to hide posts from such accounts here. But some of these tend to fall through the cracks until enough people report them. And the fakes are now coming so fast and furious, it’s difficult for Bluesky’s lean team to keep up. (Fast Company has reached out to Bluesky about its plans for adding more verification features, and will update this story if we get a response.)

An account purporting to be Rob Reiner has reeled in 12,000 followers in a week by posting as though the outspoken liberal filmmaker were going through an existential crisis at the dawn of the second Trump era. Since that account does not contain the word “parody” in its bio, while somewhat mimicking Reiner’s voice, perhaps not enough people even know to report it.

Lesser-known public figures, like retired Lieutenant General Mark Hertling have found impersonators on Bluesky. (The giveaway in his case was probably that the bio lists him as a “Fromer [sic] soldier,” although that’s not as blatant a forgery as the fake Justin Trudeau account, which couldn’t even spell the Canadian PM’s name correctly.) TikToker Alice Cottonsox similarly spawned multiple fake accounts within a day of arriving on Bluesky. If this is the first impression anyone with a preexisting following has while trying out a new platform, what’s to keep them there?

An imperfect solution

According to a Bluesky blog entry from last year, journalists and news organizations can self-verify by setting their website directly as their username, as Fast Company has done with its handle. The Guardian recently suggested celebrities and athletes can do the same, although the process is unclear. Until users can better verify themselves, though, at least the recent deluge of fake accounts has led to a flurry of funny posts about those accounts.

Bluesky’s newfound popularity has created something of a culture clash. Longtime Bluesky users (or “elders” as they are known on the platform), who were regularly posting vulgar jokes and risqué photos, now have to contend with the fact that their coworkers and maybe even their bosses are now along for the ride. Meanwhile, an influx of X’s most active journalists have ushered in a lot more news content between the fun stuff. As Bluesky scales up and settles into its new status as a discourse-generator, it will take some time and adjustment before everyone figures out what this platform is going to be.

It will be much harder to ever determine what Bluesky is, though, as long as it remains hard to confirm whether anyone on it really is who they say they are.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91233933/bluesky-big-problem-fake-accounts?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss