Starting today, Bruinsky will launch a new verification system with a familiar blue check mark popularized by Twitter.
The social platform has experienced rapid growth since its opening to the public in early 2024, which previously relied on an unconventional self-verification system where users can “authenticate” themselves by adding custom domains to their network handles. Now, it adopts a more proactive and traditional verification strategy, the Blues team identified famous accounts and granted blue check marks.
“With the functionality stabilized, it will be a rolling process, and then we will launch public forms that people can use to ask for verification,” said CEO Jay Graber. Currently, the highest priority accounts are government officials, news agencies and journalists, as well as celebrities.
As Bluesky grew, its imitators constituted an uplift of public figures, as recorded last year by MIT Technology Review. To meet the growing demand for ways to confirm account legitimacy, some Blues users have put it into practice to create their own verification systems. As the app continues to attract celebrity users (Former president Barack Obama joined this spring), it is a more formal verification process that will help ensure public figures Blues is a safe digital video gathering space. “We want to reduce fraud and imitation and promote a more trustworthy environment on the blues,” Graber said.
It’s not groundbreaking to launch content that’s very close to Twitter’s original verification system. Still, it’s savvy. The reason for social networks like Instagram and Tiktok is not because they must want to copy the features of their competitors. This is because these symbols have been successfully established as visual cues, so an account was reviewed.
When Elon Musk cleared the old blue check mark of the Weibo platform to take a paid approach, he beat the real value of the symbol in the X ecosystem and offered a cute gift for the ubiquitous grifters and pranksters. Still, outside of X, the blue check is still a simple shorthand for “probably not fake.”
In addition to this traditional top-down verification method, the Blues also provide a “trusted validator” status to selected review organizations. These organizations will give the blue check mark of scallops on their Bluesky accounts. The initial publications chosen as trusted validators included The New York Times and Wired, with many more.
Whether it’s the Blues itself or the accounts verified by these third-party “trusted validators”, the blue check mark it receives looks the same. When users click or click on the check mark, they will see a list of which organizations verify the account. For example, clicking on the blue check next to the name of a wired reporter will indicate that the wired verified their identity and may indicate that the Blues and other organizations have also verified it. “Multiple organizations can verify one account,” Grabber said.
On top of traditional centralized verification products, the introduction of a trusted verification program system is a tribute to the Blues’ general philosophy of decentralization. Again, some suspect this is a very practical move, as the company still has less than 25 heads.
Bluesky users should start seeing the first official blue check mark today.
