Washington, D.C. — June 18, 2025.
Vice President JD Vance’s first venture onto the decentralised social network Bluesky lasted roughly the span of a coffee refill. Twelve minutes after his inaugural post, the platform’s impersonation-detection algorithm locked the account, mistaking the real Vance for a fake. The profile was restored almost immediately, but not before users broadcast screenshots of the outage across the web. nypost.com
A Rapid-Fire Timeline
| Time (EDT) | Event |
|---|---|
| 6:42 p.m. | Vance tweets a screenshot of his brand-new Bluesky handle, urging 4 million X followers to “come talk common sense.” foxnews.com |
| 6:54 p.m. | Bluesky’s automated filters tag the account as a suspected impersonator and disable it. timesofindia.indiatimes.com |
| 7:03 p.m. | Bluesky engineers verify the profile, flip the switch back on, and issue a statement blaming “past waves of spoof accounts” for the false positive. techcrunch.com |
Why the Lockout Happened
Bluesky’s safety team uses pattern-matching to hunt celebrity fakes. According to the company, Vance’s sudden appearance—without prior notice to staff—tripped those safeguards. The platform has since added a permanent verification checkmark to the vice-presidential profile to prevent a repeat. timesofindia.indiatimes.com
Political Subtext
Vance’s debut post wasn’t small talk. He praised Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurrence in United States v. Skrmetti, the Supreme Court ruling that upheld state bans on gender-affirming care for minors. Progressives on Bluesky, already wary of X’s rightward drift, began flagging the content within minutes. Whether those reports contributed to the bot’s decision remains unclear; Bluesky says the trigger was entirely algorithmic. nypost.com
Platform Math
- X (formerly Twitter): ~600 million monthly active users
- Bluesky: ~30 million monthly active users
While the gulf is wide, Bluesky’s audience skews younger and left-leaning—an attractive arena for politicians courting the digital commentariat. Vance is the highest-ranking conservative to plant a flag there so far. nypost.comtimesofindia.indiatimes.com
What’s Next
Bluesky’s engineers say they will tighten the onboarding process for public officials, likely mirroring traditional “white-glove” verification used by larger networks. Vance, meanwhile, has already returned to posting—gaining more than 8,000 followers overnight and promising “lively, data-driven debate.” Whether that promise survives Bluesky’s famously combative threads is anyone’s guess, but the twelve-minute timeout has already earned a place in the annals of social-media snafus.
