Bluesky Passes Threads for Active Website Users, But Confronts 'Scammers and Impersonators'

Bluesky now has more active website users than Threads in the U.S., according to a graph from the Financial Times. And though Threads still leads in app usage, 'Prior to November 5 Threads had five times more daily active users in the U.S. than Bluesky... Now, Threads is only 1.5 times larger than its rival, Similarweb said.'
But 'the influx of new users has opened up new opportunities for scammers and impersonators,' Engadget reported this week:

A recent analysis by Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security Trust and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech found that 44 percent of the top 100 most-followed accounts on Bluesky had at least one 'doppelganger,' with most looking like 'cheap knock-offs of the bigger account, down to the same bio and profile picture,' Mantzarlis wrote in his newsletter Faked Up.

The article highlighted issues with Bluesky's loose account verification policies. And then, Bluesky announced a new change-of-policy Friday. Engadget reports:

The Bluesky Safety account said that the social media service is removing accounts that are impersonating other people and those squatting on handles... Bluesky now requires parody, satire or fan accounts to label themselves as such in both their handles and their bio. If they don't, or if they only indicate the nature of their account in one of those elements, then they'll be treated as an impersonator and will be removed from the platform. Bluesky now explicitly prohibits identity churning, as well. Accounts that start as impersonators with the purpose of gaining new users, and who then switch to a different identity in an attempt to circumvent the ban, will still get booted off the app. Finally, it says it's exploring 'additional options to enhance account verification,' though they're not quite ready for rollout.

Bluesky says they've 'quadrupled the size of our moderation team, in part to action impersonation reports more quickly. We still have a large backlog of moderation reports due to the influx of new users as we shared previously, though we are making progress.' And in addition, 'We are working behind the scenes to help many organizations and high-profile individuals set up their verified domain handles.'

And there's another problem. 'The EU's executive arm on Monday said Bluesky didn't provide information it was required to share under the bloc's Digital Services Act,' reports Bloomberg. Bluesky responded that it's working to comply, ' consulting with its lawyer to follow the EU's information disclosure rules, a Bluesky spokesperson wrote on Tuesday in an email.'

'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,' Thomas Regnier, the commission's spokesperson on digital matters, told reporters. 'This is not the case with Bluesky, so this is not followed....'

Under the DSA, platforms with more than 45 million users in the bloc qualify as 'very large online platforms' and need to follow stricter content moderation rules under the commission's supervision. Breaches can result in fines of up to 6% of their global annual sales... Smaller platforms are still required to comply with the law, but are regulated by the EU country where they have a legal presence. That's so far unclear in the case of Bluesky, which was created expressly to avoid a centralized ownership structure.

The commission asked EU member countries' national authorities to investigate 'and see if they can find any trace of Bluesky' in their jurisdictions, Regnier said

Read more of this story at Slashdot.