Serious Certification Problem Haunting Bluesky
Bluesky: A New Playground Against Identity Theft
Bluesky, an emerging social media platform, is seriously plagued. An influx of fresh users has created a space for scammers and identity thieves to take advantage of its publicity and its atypical means of verification.
Problem of Verification on Bluesky
Unlike other platforms giving out verification badges to public figures, Bluesky is considerably hands-off. It permits users to use a custom domain as a pseudonym to self-verify. But this again has its limitations: that involves manual handling not possible for everyone, and to add, it is more complicated to verify multiple accounts with the same domain.
Identity theft, a big headache
As soon as you update your nickname to use a domain you control, your old nickname becomes up for grabs once more. So, unless you create a new account to “squathat old pseudonym, you risk some imposter reaping it. Adding a custom domain doesn’t completely protect against spoofing, either. A dedicated scammer could use a similar domain to “verify” an imposter account.
User solutions against identity theft
Confronted with such challenges, some Bluesky users have devised their own solutions. Hunter Walker is an investigative journalist and one of the early Bluesky users who verifies journalists, celebrities, and other high-profile accounts himself. To date, he has verified over 330 people.
These can be moderated for the time being with these efforts, but without Bluesky providing or a third-party identity service offering support, identity theft will always be an issue. In fact, rampant identity theft is often the least of the problems a platform like Bluesky faces-as Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security and Trust Initiative at Cornell Tech, noted in his newsletter Faked Up.
The Future of Verification on Bluesky
For its part, Bluesky recognized the problem of identity theft. It’s working on more usable visual signals to help verify. But otherwise, Bluesky doesn’t seem eager to consider verification approaches beyond custom domains. Still, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber has given some reason to believe that she might be open to alternatives for verification.
