• by Colin Kirkland , April 21, 2025

Bluesky is rolling out visible account verification labels similar to Twitter’s blue check marks. For now, the checks will be applied to notable user accounts, including those belonging to organizations, politicians and celebrities. 

“Trust is everything,” the company stated on Monday. “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.”

With 35 million active users, the decentralized X-alternative app has decided to begin legitimizing popular accounts so that its growing user base remains informed about who they are following and the content they are consuming. 

Bluesky says it will proactively verify authentic and notable accounts and display a blue check next to their names, while also allowing independent organizations to verify accounts within their company via the platform’s “Trusted Verifiers” feature. 

For now, Blueksy is only naming “a few” trusted verifiers, including the New York Times and WIRED, which can issue blue checks to its journalists directly in the app before Bluesky’s moderation team manually reviews each verification. 

Users can click on verified accounts’ blue checks to see which organizations have granted verification.

The feature builds on Bluesky’s initial verification layer of letting individuals and organizations set their website domain as their username. But even with over 270,000 accounts linked to their website, Bluesky says that it received feedback from users wanting a visual signal showing which accounts are authentic. 

The company hopes this first round of blue checks will help cut down on the spread of misleading content by impersonators. The issue was documented in the MIT Technology Reviewlast year, showing reputable journalists being impersonated in order to scam Bluesky users.

Bluesky says it plans to accept applications for verification in the future.