Back in October 2023, when Bluesky was a fledgling invite-only network, I set up the account @vonderleyen.bsky.social for a few reasons (and I wrote about the experiment then).

First, it seemed like a reasonable bet that Bluesky would grow into viable Twitter alternative for EU politics.

Second, it was better I got the username than it falling into the hands of someone malevolent. From the off I made it clear I was behind the account.

Third, I wanted to wake up the EU institutions to the need to take verification and identity seriously on Bluesky.

So now I am happy to be able to announce that – from today 21 November 2024 – the account has been officialised, and is now run by von der Leyen’s team. You can find it here. This has been handled simply and easily and with the minimum of fuss – I have simply handed the account over to them.

There is a slight issue at the time of writing – the account will use the username vonderleyen.at.ec.europa.eu (the central European Commission account is at @ec.europa.eu) but currently it is showing as “Invalid Handle” – I presume until some additional DNS settings have filtered through.

More generally I have done a sort of Brexit diagram to help people work out whether an account is legitimate on Bluesky, and this account will follow the best practice – you can find high res versions of these diagrams here.

Is this system ideal? No. Was Twitter’s blue tick system in the Dorsey era ideal? No, that was not either, although more for administrative rather than technical reasons. These verification issues are complicated. But the crux is this: any high profile person or institution needs to take these questions seriously, including on Bluesky. Because, for EU politics at least, having the President of the European Commission there in an official capacity is likely to hasten the move to that network and ending Twitter’s pre-eminence in the Brussels bubble at last.