If everyone is verified, no one is verified | Hacker News Reader

If everyone is verified, no one is verified

9to5mac.com

18 pointsthunderbong17 comments

Verified status is kinda weird in the first place.

First of all, I am not on twitter, so I don't actually know what I am talking about.

The problem is they don't say what is being verified, just that it is verified.

As I understand it. the verified tag means(or used to mean) that a twitter account claiming to be a person of certain infamy is actually that person. however there is no additional information as to exactly what the verified cv for this person is.

I would have expected, at minimum, something like certificate authority verification. and twitter could make a claim like(all examples are fake). @cmarc239 is verified to be the youtube channel "couriusmarc", @will_i_am is verified to be sony_music/blackeyedpeas, @joebiden is verified to be jbidon@whitehouse.gov or @rprwins is verified to be the twitch account m_rpr_actual

I was wondering the same thing. Surely you have to be verified AS something. You can't just be generally verified.

Maybe you shouldn't be able to change your display name once verified as a fix. Or you can change it but the tick is hidden if you use anything other than your official name.

I see plenty of blue check accounts now with Elon Musk as their display name which defeats the point. Lock in your identity to the name you are publically known as. Make the whole name blue or put it in a border containing the check

Twitter used to remove the blue checkmark if the user changes their name or their handle. and the verification was an attestation that Twitter verified that the user's name matches the identity.

not sure why they've removed that. would've helped here this case.

The $8 is important because it's a tax on bad behavior. Want to spam-post about your crypto giveaway? At least now you'll be out that $8 with each of your accts that gets deleted/flagged.

Previously the cost was $10-$200 per thousand twitter accts. (via a captcha farm). So this change makes it significantly more costly to spam.

https://www.icir.org/vern/papers/twitter-acct-purch.usesec13...

  > The $8 is important because it's a tax on bad behavior.

but then why call it "verified user" as apposed to "premium user" or some such.

inertia, probably

Of course people are verified. The forms of payment is enough verification. To claim a business you must submit form of payment and other legal proof.

Social media distorts reality to the point that people are now confusing “verification” with “influence status”. Yes, if everybody can be verified, then it loses its value as a status symbol, and that’s good.

Form of payment is not used as identity verification anywhere lol. Completely unrelated.

Do you mean it cannot be used for verification or just that it’s currently not practiced?

Go to a grocery store for a prepaid $10 Visa card, or privacy.com, or any of the thousand other services that generate virtual cards, and explain to me how you verify identity behind those.

It’s not used for verification because credit card transactions don’t actually carry the information necessary to verify it. Even an actual physical card does not verify the name on it during transactions.

That’s the thing, I don’t know enough about the inner workings of the credit card system so I couldn’t explain anything to you.

…which is why I asked for clarification.

USPS uses a payment it to validate change of address requests.

1) Verifying an address is not the same as verifying an identity.

2) Your credit card billing info does mostly include your address. It does not however include your name. Your address is (mostly) validated by the transaction, your name is not at all.

  > Yes, if everybody can be verified, then it loses its value as a status symbol, and that’s good.

why?

For one: People are less incentivized to bribe Twitter employees just to get the badge.

  > bribe Twitter employees just to get the badge.

wow, i had no idea that was a thing... interesting

This reminds me of ssl certs: you can pay for a basic cert or one with identity verification. Most users don’t check identity verification but its super important. To prevent scams, not security per se. Twitter doesn’t even offer an id verification service: maybe for $50/yr they should confirm who the poster is and forbid imposters from poaching your name.

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