Bluesky specified requirements for labeling accounts as parody, satire or fan accounts, apparently responding to the growing problem with accounts that are not related to the celebrities whose names they bear. The short messaging service announced it before the weekend; Two days earlier, a researcher from the United States had determined that 44 of the 100 largest accounts on Bluesky had “double”. However, only 16 percent of them are marked as such. Bluesky now wants to enforce this more strictly and label infringing accounts as “copycats”. Also, Twitter Alternatives promises that further verification options will be investigated.
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hard verification
The problems caused by unverified accounts on the short messaging service became apparent after Elon Musk took to Twitter. He has repeatedly changed Twitter’s highly criticized system of using blue checkmarks to indicate verified accounts, with sometimes chaotic results. The symbol is now available for payment; Verification is no longer associated with it. Individuals or organizations can register on BlueSky Verified two different ways using your own domainThis becomes part of the account name. However, both are not necessarily trivial, and in turn the changed account name ending with “bsky.social” becomes available again.
Bluesky security team now explainsMany users had asked for additional methods for verification. Further options are being investigated and we hope to be able to share more details soon. The criticism also often references the competing Mastodon approach. All you have to do is link the Mastodon profile to a website link around attribute rel=me to supplementThe URL of this page will be displayed with a green tick on the linked profile. Since many services already support it, the Mastodon account does not need to be verified with its own homepage, it also works through an account on GitHub; Bluesky can handle the approach.
It’s unclear how big the problem is with accounts on BlueSky that don’t belong to the people or organizations they claim to be. However, one hint comes from Alexios Mantzarlis, who researches security and trust on the Internet at Cornell University. A few days ago he looked at the biggest accounts on BlueSky and found copies of each one. Surprisingly often he found what he was looking forOf the 100 largest accounts owned by a single person, 44 had his lookalike, but only 7 were flagged as such, most of them with only a few dozen followers. But that already puts them in the top percentile. They even found an account where the “doppelganger” had registered a domain with the handle “bsky.social” to make it look more real than the original.
(mho)
