44 of the top 100 Bluesky accounts have a duplicate

Australia’s government gave up on its proposed bill against online misinformation. The UK Parliament launched a new inquiry on “social media, misinformation and harmful algorithms” and seems to believe Elon Musk will show up. An analysis of health-related sponsored content on Brazilian media outlets found that the vast majority of these ads were misleading. The New York Post’s front page on Saturday equated misinformation research with censorship. UNESCO thinks creators should get fact-checking training. A high school student in Florida who shared deepfake nudes of at least 30 of her classmates was charged of a third-degree felony; her ex-boyfriend, who created the images, walked free.

In last week’s newsletter, I speculated that impersonation may be one of BlueSky’s most immediate challenges on the disinformation front.

I can now ground that take in a little bit more data. Over the past week, I manually searched for any accounts impersonating the top 500 BlueSky users1 by follower count.

Given that it’s not always possible to ascertain that the bigger accounts themselves are legitimate — e.g. Ryan Reynolds and Arnold Schwarzenegger are in the top 500 with accounts that barely posted — I will refer to the less-followed copies of popular accounts as “doppelgängers” rather than impersonators.

Of the 305 accounts representing a named individual, at least 74 have at least one doppelgänger (paid subscribers can access the data here2). Because many have more than one double, I found 140 doppelgängers in total.

Among the top 100 most followed named individuals, fully 44% have at least one duplicate. Most are cheap knock-offs of the bigger account, down to the same bio and profile picture. Only 16% of the duplicates that I reviewed had an “impersonation” label.

These are on average small accounts: the median doppelgänger has 90 followers. But consider that at the time of writing, having more than 85 followers puts you in the 95th percentile of most followed users on BlueSky.

For now, this seems like it’s cheap engagement bait. More popular accounts are more targeted, regardless of whether they are better known IRL. Most of the named individuals who got one of the 10 most reposted skeets on each of the days between Nov 21 and Nov 25 have at least one duplicate.

But sloppy verification is an early signal of broader deception and catnip for organized disinformation actors. Kamala Harris, who isn’t even on BlueSky, at one point had 20 impersonator accounts.

Anecdotally, BlueSky appears to realize the importance of this issue. Over the past week, semi-viral posts by impostor accounts for Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Trump universe gajillionaire Bill Ackman were relatively swiftly deleted.

BlueSky COO Rose Wang has promoted the feature that allows users to claim a handle tied to a domain they own as a verification mechanism.

But it is a mechanism that is relatively simple for impersonators to circumvent. Media analyst Kat Abughazaleh, who was in my sample of BlueSky’s top 500 users, posts on BlueSky with the handle @katmabu.bsky.social. She confirmed to me that she does not own the handle @katmabu.com, which belongs to an impostor who went to the trouble of creating a custom domain in the hope of impersonating her.

This is not a sustainable setup for a platform that hopes to overcome Threads and X.

BlueSky CEO Jay Graber discussed the issue in a live stream on Monday, suggesting the platform might eventually ship its own verification feature while also allowing other services to provide their own.

In the interim, perhaps we’ll have to follow Sky News presenter Sophy Ridge’s lead and verify via a selfie-with-a-unique-handwritten-note.