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Comment by tx8653 | Hacker News Reader

This shows that the Twitter verified accounts system/blue checkmarks are pretty worthless. Gravel may have handed his password over to the kids, but other “individual” accounts are run by multiple admins using Twitter’s built-in features, and some politicians have the disclaimer “tweets by me have my initials”.

Twitter should restrict verified individual accounts to a single user (the actual person who owns the account) and remove the check mark from people who violate those rules. There are also individual accounts that seem to be selling access to their followers by giving admin rights to others.

Accounts that have multiple admins should have this explicitly called out in the profile/name (“Office of XYZ”) , and which admin posted the Tweet needs to be made explicit.

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It's not feasible for Twitter to evaluate what person actually typed the characters, and that isn't very relevant to the issue of knowing whether the message is something the person supports anyway. The check-mark means the account is verified to be owned by a certain person, and I think it's very useful to know whether an account is owned by a certain figure/politician. It's very useful to know that this account is making posts supported by Mike Gravel, and that these kids are not just people he's never met making posts under his name. Most popular politicians have a lot of popular parody accounts, and knowing whether you're looking at a message made by a campaign vs one made by someone parodying a campaign is valuable information. At the end of the day, if an account is making posts [verified person] does not support that person can either (a) change their password or (b) ask twitter to remove the verification. The blue checkmark then signifies the account is actually run by that person, regardless of who is typing the majority of the posts. It's a matter of common sense that it's possible for me and anyone else with an online account to give my password to someone else, and then that person could make posts with my account. What the check mark tells me is that no one has taken the account and locked the owner out of it, because if they did the person would have just told Twitter and the check mark would be gone.

That's not what it means, and I don't think any large number of people actually think that's what it means. It means the account is verified to be owned by X,

I beg to differ. Twitter accounts of individuals come across as a personal medium, not a mass propaganda outfit. I would be extremely surprised if a majority of users realized that an individual account with a blue checkmark was actually being run by a team.

As for sharing passwords: Twitter has to have mechanisms for detecting multiple logins to the same account.

Checkmarks verify that the post is not made by someone claiming to represent a person, who does not actually represent that person. It solves the issue of fake accounts, which is a very real problem. For politicians, it doesn't really make much of a difference anyway whether they are the person physically typing the message. When a politician gives a speech, that speech will be written by a team of people working for the campaign. Even when answering questions at a town hall, the answers will just be talking points decided by the campaign, and I think that's common knowledge. Even if Twitter could verify 100% that a certain person typed the characters what would that get us? Gravel would just ask these kids what he should type, or they would send him the text directly. You could argue that this would at least guarantee he's seen the posts and that he therefore approves them, but don't we know that already? If he doesn't approve the posts he can either change his password or ask Twitter to remove the accounts verification.

We could also just designate a limited number of people as politicians’ voice, who speak for him. We could call this new job, I don’t know, “spokesperson”?

People on Twitter don’t expect spokespeople, they expect the actual person whose name is on the account. If they can’t be bothered to Tweet 280 characters on an issue personally, maybe they shouldn’t be Tweeting about it at all, or leave it to the “office of” or “campaign of” accounts.

Twitter has always had a "namespace" issue and verification icons are just a hack.

The most manageable solution to this namespace issue is to let everyone with a domain also own their own namespace (DNS + ActivityPub, for example)

Au contraire, twitter is popular only because it is a shared space with no barriers. Namespaces complicate this: see mastadon.

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