The record of official accounts hasn’t caught up with Bluesky and Threads

Since 2023, people and institutions have been opening accounts on Bluesky and Threads, and on Mastodon before that, but the public record of which account is official lags far behind.

Of the 155,129 public figures and organisations Verified Handles lists, 13.3% record a Threads account, 1.4% a Bluesky account and 1.3% a Mastodon account. Where nobody has recorded the real account, there is nothing to check a new one against, and an impersonator can fill the gap.

Adoption differs by country. Among politicians, Germany’s lead on Bluesky (13.2%) and Mastodon (9.2%). The UK’s are at 5.1% on Bluesky. US politicians favour Threads (17.3%) over Bluesky (4.1%), and Brazil’s (30.2%) and Japan’s (18.1%) went to Threads, with almost none on Bluesky.

Politicians, by country

Politicians by country of citizenship (Wikidata’s P27), for the 12 countries with the most politicians on Verified Handles:

By kind of entry

Off X, and no successor on record

For 5,012 entries, Wikidata marks every X account as ended or deprecated. Only 520 of them (10.4%) record a Bluesky, Threads or Mastodon account: 454 Threads, 55 Bluesky and 48 Mastodon. This is a weak sign of people leaving X: many of the 5,012 are suspended or renamed accounts, or X accounts that an automated edit marked as no longer found at the end of 2020. What it does show is that the record rarely names a successor.

One part of Bluesky checks itself

A Bluesky handle can be a web domain, such as Marques Brownlee’s mkbhd.com or Wikipedia’s wikipedia.org, and only someone who controls the domain can use it as a handle. 541 of the 2,273 Bluesky handles we list (23.8%) are a domain rather than a name ending in bsky.social. Where that domain is the subject’s own website, it is strong evidence the account is theirs: our guide how to check an official account explains how to check.

What we cannot show yet: a trend

Verified Handles began copying Wikidata’s Bluesky and Mastodon properties on 5 October 2026, so the date a handle reached our records tells you when we copied it, not when its owner moved. The site’s older history, from its wiki years, went quiet in 2023. This is a snapshot, not growth. We will measure it again each month and publish the series.

Method and limits

• Where the figures come from. Verified Handles’ staging database, read-only: a full copy of the production database taken on 28 October 2026 (its newest Wikidata sync edit at 11:10 UTC). The live database moves every hour, so the figures on the site today may differ slightly.
• Kinds of entry come from what Wikidata says about each entry: politicians and journalists by occupation (P106), creators as YouTubers, streamers, influencers, TikTokers and podcasters, banks and financial firms by industry (P452) or kind of organisation, the rest by the kind of organisation. An entry can be in more than one group. Only entries that are neither merged nor blocked are counted.
• A share is the entries listing at least one account on that platform. A politician’s country is their citizenship on Wikidata; a politician with two citizenships counts in both.
• What Verified Handles lists is what Wikidata, the site’s own history since 2020 and our reviewers record. A platform with no account on record does not prove the subject has none.
• X is over-represented. 92% of all entries list an X account, a legacy of the site’s 2020–2023 records, which were built around X. Compare Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon with each other, not with X.
• A domain handle is any Bluesky handle not ending in bsky.social; we did not check each domain against the subject’s own website.
• This article was drafted with AI assistance and checked by its author, who re-ran every figure on the day.

The figures behind this article, like all of Verified Handles’ data, are CC0. The queries, run against the database with read-only access:

-- Politicians on the new platforms, by country of citizenship
WITH pol AS (SELECT entity_id FROM entity_fact WHERE property = 'P106' AND value_qid = 'Q82955')
SELECT f.value_qid country, count(DISTINCT p.entity_id) politicians,
  count(DISTINCT p.entity_id) FILTER (WHERE EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM handle h WHERE h.entity_id = p.entity_id AND h.platform_id = 'bluesky')) bluesky
  -- and the same for threads and mastodon
  FROM pol p JOIN entity_fact f ON f.entity_id = p.entity_id AND f.property = 'P27'
  JOIN entity e ON e.id = p.entity_id AND NOT e.blocked
 GROUP BY 1 ORDER BY 2 DESC LIMIT 12;

-- Entries whose every X account Wikidata marks over
SELECT DISTINCT e.id FROM wikidata_claim c JOIN entity e ON e.qid = c.qid AND e.merged_into IS NULL AND NOT e.blocked
 WHERE c.platform_id = 'twitter' AND c.present AND (c.ended OR c.rank = 'deprecated')
   AND NOT EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM wikidata_claim x WHERE x.qid = c.qid AND x.platform_id = 'twitter'
                    AND x.present AND NOT x.ended AND x.rank IS DISTINCT FROM 'deprecated');

-- Bluesky handles that are a domain
SELECT count(*), count(*) FILTER (WHERE value !~* '\.bsky\.social$') FROM handle WHERE platform_id = 'bluesky';