Sawt Falasteen - X rival Bluesky adds blue checks for trusted accounts

In a blog post, the company said it would "proactively verify authentic and notable accounts and display a blue check next to their names."

"Trust is everything," the team said in the post.

The move mirrors a feature once deployed at Twitter in an effort to thwart imposters and help users know when account holders were authentic.

Billionaire Elon Musk did away with verifying who was behind accounts after he bought Twitter, now called X, in 2022.

Instead, Musk offered blue check marks to those paying for subscriptions for an X Premium tier on the social network.

"Social media has connected us in powerful ways, but it hasn't always given us the tools to know who we're interacting with or why we should trust them," the Bluesky team said in its post.

Bluesky was created by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey as a side project in 2019.

Dorsey pulled five engineers aside to build a decentralized alternative to Twitter.

He said at the time that centralized attempts to police abuse and misinformation on a platform like Twitter were unlikely to work, and that he wanted to give users more control of personal data and content moderation.

Bluesky did not see the light of day until 2023, the year after Twitter was bought by Musk -- a key ally of US President Donald Trump who has pushed misinformation on his platform since his takeover.

Bluesky said in a post early this year that it had grown to more than 30 million users.

The burgeoning social media network already lets individuals and organizations verify who they are by letting them use their website addresses as their user names, and more than 270,000 accounts use that option, according to the platform.

Bluesky is starting out such "trusted verifiers" with blue checks and plans to eventually launch a request form for accounts seeking the mark of authenticity, the team said.

Bluesky's chief operating officer Rose Wang said in a recent interview with AFP that she was optimistic about the social network's trajectory.

"We really see this as our coming-out year," she said.

"People want to know what's happening in the world and need a safe, moderated space to discuss it, have fun, and make friends. Right now, they're not finding that anywhere else."

N.AbuHussein--SF-PST