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Comment by trompetenaccoun | Hacker News Reader

The blog post is unclear on if they will only be allowed to verify accounts as being part of NYT or if they will be allowed to give out blue checks to anyone in general. It sounds like it's the latter. If not it shouldn't be a blue check at all, it should just inform users that the account is associated with NYT.

News organizations have in recent years started selling so-called "contributor" positions. Anyone with enough money can be a journalist and influence public opinion. And NYT and similar outlets are not trustworthy sources either way, they sneak edit articles when they get caught spreading misinformation but regularly don't disclose what was actually changed. Basically rewriting their reporting as the narrative changes.

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> The blog post is unclear on if they will only be allowed to verify accounts as being part of NYT or if they will be allowed to give out blue checks to anyone in general.

On a technical level, any account can "verify" any other account.

On a practical level, blue checks are shown only if that verification comes from someone BlueSky trusts. Right now, that's bsky.app and nytimes.com.

That’s very interesting. Does It mean NYTimes can also provide a Blue Check to someone from BBC, Reuters or even from a completely different org?

At the protocol level, any account can verify any other account. If you have one, you can verify anyone you'd like right now. The NYT can verify any account, even ones from those organizations, or not even from a news organization.

The only difference is that Bluesky won't show a blue check for just any verification, only ones from accounts they trust. That's a social relationship, not a technical one, and so I'm sure if the NYT decided to go rogue, Bluesky would have them not be an input into the blue check any more.

> News organizations have in recent years started selling so-called "contributor" positions.

Which ones? I've heard of that with lower credibility organizations (Forbes, I think), but nothing like the NYT.

> they sneak edit articles when they get caught spreading misinformation but regularly don't disclose what was actually changed.

I think they correct things. I'm not sure they have ever been in the habit if notifying people of every correction, though it would be interestesting to have an edit history with diffs.

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