Any name change at all will cause temporary loss of verified checkmark | Hacker News Reader

Any name change at all will cause temporary loss of verified checkmark

twitter.com

31 pointstosh48 comments

This is absolutely necessary to stop scammers, like when the former PM of Somalia's 'verified' account was hacked, its display name was changed to "vitalik.eth", and a tweet about an ETH "giveaway" received eleven thousand likes (obviously from fake accounts).

https://imgur.com/a/LZkbms9

Also, verification by definition means you lose your verified checkmark when you change your display name, as that display name was not the one that had verified. This should have been the case ten years ago.

When I see how many people are fooled by a display name it blows my mind. You see these people with jobs, houses, cars, etc., yet they're fooled by:

    vitalik.eth
    @lolgonnastealyourcryptobro

How do you even log in to a computer or create an online account if you don't understand the difference between a display name and a username? I just don't get it.

The display name is high contrast, bold, in a larger font and draws attention to itself. The username is in a low contrast color, smaller font, and clearly secondary and the whole layout is formatted in a way that makes it 'obvious' that the username is secondary and unimportant.

Except no one actually reads that way. People know how Twitter works. They know the display name changes. They know the username is the part after the "@", rather than being an unimportant, random string. That latter part is so well known it's become an idiom across the internet in general - people on HN will refer to dang as @dang, for example.

HN itself is designed so that all text except the comment is as difficult to read as a downvoted comment, but people here know what the username is.

People know how Twitter works.

You, I, and most people here on HN, obviously do. The evidence however seems to suggest that a lot of people on Twitter clearly don't. And that responsibility falls to a large part on Twitter as there are many obvious ways they could improve the situation.

I see no evidence that people on Twitter know less about how Twitter works than people on HN (many of whom can't even read a thread on Twitter, as they will vocally complain about it being incomprehensible to them) given that changing one's display name on Twitter has been common for years, and that we're talking about a viral meme, which implies people being in on the joke.

>And that responsibility falls to a large part on Twitter as there are many obvious ways they could improve the situation.

Sure, they could improve the situation by having verification work as intended, instead of breaking it in favor of an awkward and shameless ploy to monetize it. But that's orthogonal to the question of whether or not these mock verified accounts are fooling a lot of people, and I don't think they are.

The negativity in this comment section is so weird. Isn't this is exactly what people on HN were asking for a few months ago. And this is such an obvious fix for an obvious problem. I don't get what the issue is

Let's say you're a band that just released a new album. It's really common on twitter to change your profile name to "BandName New Album Out X/YY!". This is a really common part of how Twitter operates, but this change to remove verification checks due to name changes will reduce the ability of people to legitimately use the platform, all because Elon Musk didn't like verified people impersonating him as a joke.

That is interesting, though it seems more of a hack. This seems like something that should be in the bio, not part of the name. Though perhaps Twitter can add user flairs like Reddit

All of Twitter is built on hacks.

Hashtags? User created hacks. Retweeting? User created hacks. The majority of Twitter’s mechanisms involved users hacking something together and when it was successful enough, Twitter formalizing it.

I think this contributed a lot to Twitter's reputation for scrappiness in the early days and why people are so emotionally attached to it to this day.

And formalizing it in this case would be user flairs. This way the flair can change, but the name stays. Though Twitter will only bother adding flairs if enough people complain that they can't tack on promotions to their names, and I'm not seeing that yet

Is it that weird? The apparent trigger for this policy is Kathy Griffin "impersonating" Musk, and nobody thought her account was his. Her account got suspended, which goes above and beyond this policy; which happened before this policy came out, despite his promise of no major content decisions until he gets his moderation committee together (which hasn't happened yet). He's all "free speech absolutism" but lashes out at people whose speech is critical of him. So yeah. Expect some negativity.

Are we sure that's the trigger? As I said, this is something HN has been asking for for months. And the fix is so obvious. It's natural that Elon would push for it in his first week or so

Just because you said this is what HN has been asking for months doesn’t mean it’s true. It’s not even clear why HN would be asking this for months because there was no concern about this issue until a few weeks ago thanks to the blue check marks.

Any links to a thread where a substantial number of HN commenters were asking for this policy?

Here, from 2 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32841997

And it's the top comment on the thread

Do you have any evidence that Musk gives a shit about what people say on this site? Because he responds to Kathy Griffin. He doesn't appear to be posting here.

It's less that Elon reads this site, and more that it's an obvious solution that people were asking for months ago. I'm sure twitter PMs and engineers have brought this up internally many times

Did I say that I was sure of the trigger or did I indicate uncertainty with the word "apparent"?

Which is the more likely cause for this policy change:

  1: Kathy Griffin poked the bear

  2: Randos on HN thought a policy would be a good idea

My money's on 1.

I guess we'll have to disagree then, I feel Elon was already planning on making this change before Kathy did anything

The obvious answer is of course

Hur dur Musk bad

It’s an obvious improvement but it has to be framed as some kind of overreaction.

> He's all "free speech absolutism" but lashes out at people whose speech is critical of him.

She changed her display name to "Elon Musk", copied Elon's profile pic, then proceeded to tweet a political endorsement.

Do we care about misinformation, or don't we?

[0]https://twitter.com/Davei_Boi/status/1589592753805340674/pho...

This isn't even really a free speech issue. You can still change your name. Just not with a verified checkmark.

In fact we can think of twitter verification as a way of asserting that your name won't change. This way, people will trust the name more.

> You can still change your name.

For certain values of "you," anyway.

Anybody can do it. If you are already verified, just stop paying, and you'll lose verification, and now you can change your name. Perhaps they should make it easier to remove the verification yourself, though I don't see it being a common use case

The question is, what is Twitter verifying when you get the checkmark? I don’t see what they can verify if your usercode happens to be marc1986.

Maybe they just check if your real name matches your twitter display name

https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-293/242292/2022... [pdf]

Is parody free speech, or is it not?

Does parody encompass fraudulent misrepresentation? Does an identical twin or other lookalike get to claim parody defense if their actions or words incite [insert unwanted behavior] by others]? It's an interesting rabbit hole that I'm not sure has been fully litigated yet and many of my techy lawyer pals are antsy waiting for it to come about with the "inevitable" deep fake cases.

Her post was clearly marked @kathygriffin. This isn't anywhere close to the borderline cases you're elaborating here.

Why would anyone be asking for this several months ago when the $8 blue checkmark wasn’t even a thing then or not even suggested by Musk at that point.

And besides, at the time Twitter had already solved its impersonation of public figures problem for many years now with the introduction of the…blue checkmark…

Elon took a successful solution, trashed it, personally faced the consequences of doing so and came up with a completely ad hoc solution which negates one of the two things he promised he bought Twitter to do.

Everyone was talking about bots and what the possible solutions would be. A bot tax was suggested and favored by many.

Almost as if people here want to be impersonated with opposing political views to them on Twitter.

Nice job killing one of the most interesting parts of twitter culture. Sigh.

I bet this will come with an exception for Super Verified™ or wtv it ends up being called, which will require extra money and a more intrusive identity audit.

And for /another/ $4/mo on top of that, you can pick your own 32x32px badge in place of a checkmark!

Something something something and you can buy custom badges as NFTs!

Blue checkmarks were never neither interesting nor part of any culture.

Do you have any favorite articles I could read about this culture?

Perhaps the checkmark could be issued to a specific hash of the username and display name. If any of those are changed obviously the issued cert would be invalid. If they restore the information to match what the cert was issued for then it regains certification.

But… what happens if an account is legally taken over by a new entity (say CNN buys the NYT or whatever)…

I’ve derived immense enjoyment from watching the Twitter debacle unfold, so I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I like the scheme to pay for blue check marks. It’s nice to see someone has at least $8 to spend on spreading their opinion on Twitter. There’s something reassuring about that. I can’t articulate exactly why, but it feels nice to know that what I’m reading isn’t part of some cheap troll farm.

For a person who claims to be a "free speech absolutionist" he sure does do a lot of censoring of free speech, especially when it's critical of him.

Say what you will of the ACLU, but the defend the free speech rights of pornographers and klansmen alike.

> he sure does do a lot of censoring of free speech, especially when it's critical of him.

I must have missed this. What free speech has he been censoring?

https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/07/tech/kathy-griffin-twitter/in...

Kathy Griffin, noted comedian, did a parody that Musk didn't like

wasn't it "twitter is a private business that can do whatever it wants" during the pandemic when they censored the hunter biden story and people who said the vaccine didn't prevent transmission or that masks don't work like they were supposedly said to have

interesting reversal nowadays when the left perceives it doesn't have any power in twitter anymore, it's almost like they're just spineless opportunists bent on destroying their opponents?

I mean, sure they used to do that. Not so much nowadays: https://www.aclu.org/court-cases

> but the defend the free speech rights of pornographers and klansmen alike

famously they don't really do that anymore at all, in fact it's a just a progressive advocacy group now nothing like classical liberal values and fundamental constitutional individual rights

Musk has himself been the target for a number of impersonation scams promoting illegal money drops. This has been an issue for years.

Just search on YouTube or twitch for "Elon musk bitcoin or eth" and see the scams going on right now.

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