Bluesky , the social medium kip that is more and more being seen as a less problematic substitute for X , has recentlyseen a upsurge of new users . Just over a workweek ago , the platform crossed the 20 million users bench mark and briefly sat at the top of Apple App Store charts .

It , however , seems that the rapid growth did n’t come without its own share of problems . An analytic thinking of late confirmed how bad actors are abusing the impersonation tactic for illusion . In the wake of the revelations , Bluesky has announced a few changes to its policy guidelines , particularly around identity protection and personation .

“ Impersonation and handle - squatting chronicle will be removed , ” the company ’s safety team wrote in anupdateon Bluesky . It specifically mentions that if someone create an account to personate another personality for the sake of derive followers , those accounts will be removed .

“ Identity churning is not allowed on Bluesky , ” monish the company . For accounts that are judge to spoof another person , they will have to clearly describe as such , both in their username as well as the profile bio . Accounts that only hold such intent in one place will also receive the boot .

Bluesky says it is already sitting on a pile of moderation - related postulation submitted by its community due to the high-pitched bit of fresh sign - ups . “ We have also quadrupled the size of our mitigation team , in part to action at law impersonation account more apace , ” total the troupe .

Moreover , the challenging societal culture medium upstart is also planning to summate more robust identity verification meter in the cheeseparing hereafter . So far , the only reliable method of identity substantiation on Bluesky is the custom knowledge domain name facility . Notably , Bluesky wants to handle verification in a dissimilar fashion , compare to that of rival platform like X or Meta - owned social sites .

harmonize to Bluesky CEO Jay Graber ( viaTechCrunch ) , the company is hoping to construct a confirmation system where it is not the sole entity in control condition of the identity submission and authentication pipeline .

Looking over at the rival , X now relies on a Premium subscription to offer the verified badge , and so do Facebook and Instagram . Thispaid confirmation system has already backfired for X.

On Bluesky , there are no visual indicators of whether an account is verified in the same vein as the checkmark on X or Instagram . Moreover , the self - check organization on the platform is still quite technical and half - baked in its own way .

In lieu of such safety measures , Bluesky is ripe for bad actors to personate famous personality as well as businesses . Such write up can be used for all kinds of nuisance , ranging from peddling cozenage to simply engagement baiting and subsequently peddle such story .

“ Most are cheap knock - offs of the bigger bill , down to the same bio and profile icon . Only 16 % of the duplicates that I brush up had an ‘ impersonation ’ label , ” Mantzarlis wrote . It would be interesting to see how shortly Bluesky launches extra protective criterion to rein in in such bad actors and offer an official channel for identity verification .

On the positive side , the fellowship late cleared thatit wo n’t raise user substance for AI training , further bring that it has no intention of doing so in the near futurity . XTC and Meta - owned social medium platform , on the other hand , are using publicly - share mental object for training their respective procreative AI tools .