Users Flock To Bluesky But The X Rival Faces Increased Scrutiny

As informative, entertaining, and addictive as social media is, it’s also notorious for spreading misinformation, fake news and harmful effects, leading to numerous governments around the world to take strict actions.  

A lot of the false information spread on such platforms is credited to fake accounts that impersonate people of power or influence, or even parody accounts, especially of celebrities, actors, politicians, sports professionals, and more.

One such platform that’s filled to the brim with such accounts is X, formerly known as Twitter.

However, the Elon Musk-led social networking site looking to tackle misinformation spread by such accounts by labeling them “Parody Account”, allowing users to differentiate between posts by parody accounts and real accounts.

On the flip side, parody accounts have now also become a major problem for the rapidly growing social networking platform Bluesky, which was created in 2019 as a decentralized version of Twitter.
As such, the platform has blown up in popularity in the recent few months, as an alternative to the highly controversial X and Meta platforms. As such, Bluesky added over a million users in a single day (November 15) and is now well past 20 million users, as per the company.

However, the rapid influx is leading to numerous parody accounts. This includes accounts that pose as other people or businesses at first, and after gaining a strong following, change their name and purpose (known as identity churning).

“With more users joining Bluesky, we know how important it is to identify which accounts are real. Users deserve confidence that the accounts they interact with are authentic,” read an excerpt from a series of posts published by Bluesky’s Safety account.

This is where the platform’s new impersonation policy comes in place.

“We are working behind the scenes to help many organizations and high-profile individuals set up their verified domain handles. In the meantime, we’ve updated our impersonation policy to be more aggressive. Impersonation and handle-squatting accounts will be removed,” continued the post.

The post further mentions that identity churning will not be tolerated on the platform, parody accounts must clearly label themselves as such in their display name and bio.

To further its efforts, the company also revealed that it has quadrupled its moderation team to resolve impersonation reports more swiftly and to clear the backlog that’s built up with the surge in users.


On the other hand, Bluesky’s sudden growth has caught the eye of more than just users.

The social media platform has come under the scanner of government agencies and data privacy experts around the world.

In Europe, Bluesky is being pulled up by the EU (European Union) for ignoring its digital regulations.

According to EU spokesperson on digital matters, Thomas Regnier, “All platforms in the EU have to have a dedicated page on their websites where it says how many user numbers they have in the EU and where they are legally established. This is not the case with Bluesky, so this is not followed.”

While Bluesky said it was consulting with its lawyer and plans to comply with EU rules, it also needs to heed further regulations that will be added once it crosses 45 million users, which based on current trends, could be soon.

Coming to data privacy, while Bluesky doesn’t leverage user content to train AI tools (like other social networks are doing), its API (Application Programming Interface) doesn’t restrict others from doing so.

A post by machine learning librarian at Hugging Face, Daniel van Strien, posted a dataset with over 1 million public posts from Bluesky’s Firehouse API, which included text, metadata, and language predictions.

While van Strien removed the data from the dataset following controversy, he left the repository up to “allow room for discussion of how datasets can be used to help improve Bluesky and allow people to build the tools they need to build their own open models and approaches to creating feeds that work for their needs.”

Users looking to leave feedback can do so on a link provided in the message blaring the data’s pull-down.

Do you think social media platforms should be required to adhere to mandatory data protection and privacy rules and regulations before being able to operate publicly for users?

Let us know in the comments below!