Relaunching verification and what’s next
blog.twitter.com
blog.twitter.com
This is gaslighting. That's not how blue checkmarks work in practice. They are a completely synthetic credibility token that is distributed by Twitter based on whose opinions it wants to boost. That is it.
If verified accounts were about authenticity, two things would be true:
1. Anyone would be able to verify their account after completing certain steps. There would probably be a fee, but no "high public interest" requirement (because it's an obviously gameable and subjective criteria).
2. Verification would never be revoked.
Something as simple as auto-flagging any account that changes its name and picture after posting to elon musk , or if an account changes its name and picture and then subsequently posts to musk, could help. Fase positives are problem with any solution.
But also, the scam is so hard to stop and and so persistent in large part because it is so profitable for the scammer. This creates a great incentive for the scammer to devote considerable effort to evading twitter's efforts to stop it. Just making .1 btc is like a year's worth of wages if you live in a poor country, and people send way more than that. It beats selling v1gra, p0ker, etc. Nothing comes close to it.
> Twitter users are allowed to create parody, newsfeed, commentary, or fan accounts.
You have to have a disclaimer saying the account is a parody to avoid people thinking the account is the real person[1]
[0] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-imper...
[1] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/parody-accoun...
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/20/twitter-acc...
In my view, 2FA should be a requirement for verification.
PGP should've died years ago; there are far better options today.
Heck, we've seen that in library code: your AES implementation may be sound, but if the library interfaces make it easy to reuse an IV, or use a null IV[1], you have a broken cryptosystem.
[1]: https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2020-5408
And I say this as someone who works at a journalist organization where if your editor catches you not using it, you're definitely gonna get scolded.
Software 2FA is much easier to enforce.
> to be processed by 1000 customer support agents
Good luck with that
Quite a few places do this, it's not an intrinsically hard process.
There are ~200 governments in the world, most of them don't even have digital infrastructure. Not even talking about resubmissions of blurred photos, fraud detection, human mistakes etc.
Nothing to do with popularity, that correlation comes from the likelyhood of impersonation.
But yes, also vanity.
Gatekeeping of this kind always feels super slimy (Twitter Spaces has the same problem, too).
Giving General Motors a blue check mark is a no brainer because they are likely to be spending ad dollars. Giving celebrities of almost all levels, including short-lived ones, a blue check mark is also helpful because it has an impact on impersonation which is an attack vector on social networks.
The problem is that there are likely others in this celebrity bucket who are attack vectors, but bring reputational problems. Some pornstar might fall into this category. Twitter are much less likely to want to give them a blue check mark than a less well known comic. Someone can impersonate and attack a larger segment and Twitter's security team would probably advocate for reducing the risk, but the corporate arm of the organization won't go for this.
There isn't really anything nefarious here. It's just a case of the demand being so high and Twitter working out what they want to endorse. If they can get past some of the awkwardness of improving the posture around celebs like pornstars then I'd expect they'd extend the blue check mark to others who struggle. There are a lot of parties left out in the cold here. Things like this tend to be slow to evolve in corporate America.
I personally won't use sites that decide for me what I'm allowed to read (that they have already permitted to be posted). After a dozen years and tens of thousands of followers on the platform, I deleted my account.
You also can't really use a new account without getting locked out unless you add a phone number, and they have been incapable of keeping user data private or secure so far in the past.
Take a look at data/{like,follower,following}.js in the data export .zip.
The entire premise is wrong. Being verified on Twitter SHOULD NOT BE AN OPTION AT ALL because of the perverse incentives it creates, and the way it warps and destroys the whole platform.
The blue checkmark program started out as simply a way to prove you were the real you, if you were claiming to be someone important. But because of that element of "importance," it's become a mark of royalty. Blue checkmarks are the lords and masters of Twitter, largely exempt from its many abuses, because they're Very Important People. All the rest of the peasants on Twitter have to content themselves with the privilege of trodding the same digital ground as such majesty. One law for them, another for us.
Escaping from this kind of diseased thinking was a large part of the appeal of the early Internet, but now those who enjoy such perverse games are hell-bent on forcing them on everyone else. Every blue checkmark is another "Then let them eat cake!" hurled from the high parapets, a boot stomping on the face of the ordinary internet user forever. The only "good" social network site (and really the only good forum in general) is one where real names are banned. But of course that would hurt monetization, and interfere with constant surveillance by corporations and government. So we get this crap instead. The blue checkmark is incredible, because it manages to sum up, in one tiny, instantly recognizable icon, everything that is wrong with the "new" Internet.
Look at a celebrity’s post, and the top comments are other famous peoples (social media handlers) blue check comments at the top with exponentially more likes than any authentic fans comment
Not just this but any identity markers like gender or age. This is the only way to get people to face uncomfortable ideas, when they can’t dismiss it because “oh it’s a man/woman, of course they would say that”.
How would you ever prove that someone's user name isn't their real name without knowing who they are?
Only Instagram and Twitter use it for notability.
Why not allow anyone to verify, and mark notability separately?
Michael Jordan [blue check] [star]
Michael Jordan [blue check]The notability mark is useful: it means you're following basketball star Michael Jordan, which is probably what you meant. If you actually wanted to follow your brother-in-law Michael Jordan or a law professor Michael Jordan, there's really no simple binary mark that will help you separate them from each other. You'll have to do your research.
You can do also research on The Real Elon Musk Who Has Billions Of Dollars And Isn't Giving Any Of Them To You, and I honestly don't know if there's any way to help people who can't figure that out. But I could see Twitter at least wanting to try to help save people from themselves, because the bell curve has two tails.
Other than that... I'm not sure what any kind of verification really does. Maybe a dating app can help save you from wasting your time, because the whole point is that you're meeting strangers, some of whom will be bad people who get booted repeatedly. That's a completely different use case.