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Comment by Jaruzel | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly the problem with the blue tick. It's basically meaningless other than as a budge of honour. It's also restricted to large companies and 'public' figures.

What I'd like to see is, the Blue Tick being restored to be an actual mark of Verification, and be something that anyone can apply for with the appropriate identification documentation.

Additionally, there should then be a toggle switch, where only Verified accounts see tweets and replies from other Verified accounts[1]. This would effectively create two Twitters; one where every account is identifiable and accountable for what they tweet, and another that continues with the anarchic system they have now, where hate speech, racism and intolerance run rife[2].

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[1] I've heard rumours that this toggle switch already exists on Verified accounts - can anyone confirm ?

[2] Yes, free speech may be trapped here too, unless some sort of middle ground can be worked out.

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I think the Yonatan Zunger had the right solution to this: Verify Facts Not People.

Replace the checkmark with a Verified Badge that says their position if they're an elected official or major organization leader, or just Real Name if they've verified their ID.

He wrote this in response to the Jason Kessler kerfuffle, well before the "factcheckUK" stunt, but it would have actually solved that too! Imagine seeing the username "factcheckUK" with the Verified Badge "Conservative and Unionist Party, UK 🇬🇧".

https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/the-hard-lessons-of-blue-c...

Sounds just like the 'real names' policy that Google and Facebook have tried before. That never made any difference to hate speech, racism and intolerance, so why do you think it will magically make Twitter better?

I can imagine at minimum this would help with bots. Considering the problems you state are actual systematic issues we have in our society I would expect that the verification process should not be perceived as working towards solving those.

I have no idea how comment bots run today, but for anyone only slightly invested, it would mean one additional hurdle (get accounts for actual people who are not using the service), but not a blocker (like captchas: they mostly serve to annoy regular users).

That seems like a pretty large hurdle, compared to today where it seems they're just creating as many accounts as they want. There isn't a single political tweet without a bunch of bot garbage as replies. I assume any name with 8 digits at the end is a bot and an auto-block (and these are all over political tweets), but there are so many more tweets that are highly suspicious once you go in and look at their feed.

It would also exclude venerable people which is the problem with the real name idea

We can imagine a system where twitter checks that person is a real unique human but does not use their personal data for anything else.

Like when they used mobile phone numbers given for security purposes for marketing?

Until the next hack links their real name with their handle? No thanks.

How to verify uniqueness?

*vulnerable, presumably

Because the world is in a different place now. As long as twitter doesn't make it mandatory, it should work. Those that want a bit of decency on Twitter can get verified and have the knowledge that the people they converse with are who they say they are, and those that do not can carry on using Twitter in the same way they always have.

[1] Sort of. It's a tab on the Notifications screen that only shows replies/likes/mentions from other Verified accounts.

Thought so. Thanks!

Do you really think blue check marks are ‘meaningless’? Are you thinking of them in the context of, among your peers who has blue checks and who doesn’t being somewhat arbitrary? Because for sure if you’re part of a professional community that is common - you’ll find academics and journalists and medical professionals and so on all have very random experiences with blue check marks, much like tech does.

But at the same time, in aggregate, blue check marks do provide some degree of legitimacy to accounts - yes, this account is that person you know from outside twitter.

But twitter don’t do a great job of explaining how they verified an account, or even who they verified it to be. As has recently gone viral, twitter gave @sistersofmercy a blue check mark, because they really are the catholic institute of that name - not the band (@tsomofficial doesn’t have a blue check mark ...)

I think there’s the basis of something interesting in ‘verified accounts’ - and for sure they’re flawed - but I don’t think ‘meaningless’ is correct.

What do you think of Yonatan Zunger's proposed fix, to verify facts and not people?

So @sistersofmercy might get a Verified Badge saying "Religious Institute, Ireland", and @tsomofficial might get a Verified Badge saying "Musical Group, UK".

https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/the-hard-lessons-of-blue-c...

100% this is how to make it meaningful.

This problem has been solved for decades - cryptographic signatures. Twitter and their users are uninterested in a real solution, they just want engagement.

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