The Twitter Rules
support.twitter.com
support.twitter.com
It's still a useful platform for now, but they seem to be trying their hardest to be anti-user.
Verified Twitter accounts are promoted Twitter accounts. Twitter does the blue checkmark thing as a perk to attract noteworthy people to their platform, and to draw the attention of ordinary users to those noteworthy people.
I was under the same impression that OP was, so I looked up the verified account announcement from the Twitter in 2009[1]:
"To prevent identity confusion, Twitter is experimenting (beta testing) with a 'Verified Account' feature. We're working to establish authenticity with people who deal with impersonation or identity confusion on a regular basis."
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20090615114316/http://twitter.co...
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/twitter-announces-a...
>We hope opening up this application process results in more people finding great, high-quality accounts to follow
This seems to be where the line started blurring between "this is who they say they are" and "this account is an asset to our platform."
Tim Pool recounted how his account got verified a few days ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67nFNUPQaeI&t=1m25s.
TL;DW: His employer, VICE, instructed Twitter to verify him, and they did.
Ultimately that's what this badge comes down to: for most people it's a mark of being on the inside, knowing the right people. The right agency, the right employer, maybe just having a friend working at Twitter. There are some other certain criteria that aren't publicized, and they have in the past randomly given it out to "high profile" people on Twitter, even though that seems to be totally random as well.
This is a special club, Twitter has on and off said it means many things, but there's no consistency. Just like there's no consistency with how they enforce their rules, there's no consistency with this special privilege either.
Twitter gives the status to people who have good connections to Twitter.
Given we all agree on this being the actual state of things, getting mad at them for giving this status to white nationalists makes complete sense. Twitter is boosting these people with this verification process that serves to boost their friends.
If we think that the blue checkmark makes you belong to the country club, who you let in is a signifier of Twitter's beliefs.
They also don't verify popular people on other platforms who have hundreds of thousands of followers on both YouTube and Twitter who might actually be the target of some fake Twitter accounts.
Foreign terrorist association the Muslim Brotherhood is also verified, is that a tacit endorsement?
I've seen notable accounts permanently suspended from Twitter for arguing with actual neo-Nazis.
Absolutely no consistency or transparency is part of what is killing the platform for large swaths of users.
>Everybody knowledgeable about Twitter (including Twitter themselves) who makes this claim is gaslighting.
Absolutely so! Tptacek has spoken truth, albeit in a jumbled manner. The claim that the blue checkmark signifies people of public interest is ridiculous given how major world actors such as Julian Assange have been denied it.
That said, both have a long documented history of abuse ranging from verbal to physical to sexual. If Twitter keeps to their new policy, both should lose their endorsement in 5.. 4.. 3..
Hoo boy, twitter really made problems from themselves when they made a blue checkmark mean anything other than "famous person, identity verified".
Looking at the way it’s used in this comment, I would say it is ascribing malice where malice is unlikely, and would be implausible in the first place. So maybe my brain’s heuristic is justified.
https://twitter.com/h0usew1fe/status/932645874747846656
https://twitter.com/moloian_thomas/status/932645063615660033
It is quite an endeavor to regulate a platform with the population of the US with much fewer resources. Twitter isn't perfect, however I applaud their efforts.
Why is Twitter not doing anything?! They even verified him to him a more legitimate voice.
Interesting. Of course there's no way to put an actual badge in your display name. But this sounds like it's targeted at Julian Assange, who ends his name with a blue diamond emoji that is reminiscent of a verified badge if you're not looking closely.
I can't wait for this to mean what it used to mean: owning a domain and putting up a website.
I guess “Not very censorious” or “Not enough data” is the answer.
> Federated social networks such as Mastodon and GNUSocial communicate using a protocol known as ‘OStatus’. This is partly documented in an unfinished specification (the OStatus 1.0 Draft 2.0 document), and is otherwise defined by some parties as a non-living anti-standard which is ‘whatever it has been historically’, or the exact opposite ‘whatever it needs to be’, usually further qualified as ‘well, whatever my software, the one true use case, thinks it needs to be’.
[1] https://medium.com/@Rushyo/on-supporting-content-types-other...
I believe the move was founded on arguments of "OStatus is a tad unflexible for our needs" or something along those lines.