Twitter to revive controversial account verification system
Twitter Inc. will be bringing back its user identity verification system next year and is asking people to provide feedback on what the requirements for the coveted blue tick should be.
The San Francisco-based company will begin letting people request verification in early 2021. It released a draft document on Tuesday outlining a preliminary set of requirements. Accounts should be active, notable, and “associated with a prominent person or brand.”
Twitter also highlighted six types of accounts that will be eligible, but others suggest more may come later:
Twitter has said users can give the company feedback on the criteria for two weeks, and then it plans to post a final policy on December 17.
Twitter has used a blue check mark to verify the identity of well-known and popular Twitter users for years – a way to distinguish real users and business accounts from potential impersonators. But the verification program was confusing, and the company offered little clarity on the criteria. It previously allowed users to request an audit, but halted the program in 2017, with chief executive Jack Dorsey calling the process “halted.”
We haven’t clarified who can be verified and when, why an account might not be verified or what it means to be verified, the company wrote in a blog post Tuesday.
As part of the revamped verification process, Twitter said it could remove verification if a user’s account is inactive or repeatedly violates company rules. Twitter recently confirmed that it will soon end the special treatment US President Donald Trump receives for his personal Twitter account. If he often breaks Twitter rules, his tweets are considered newsworthy, so he doesn’t receive the same punishment as other users. This will end when he leaves office in January.
The Twitter verification process has caused problems for the company in the past. Twitter, unlike Facebook Inc., does not require people to use their real identities on the service, so verification badges are an important tool in making sure people can quickly know if they hear about it. ‘a real politician or a business executive, for example.
But the verification was also exclusive, and only a small group of Twitter users are verified. Over time, the blue tick has become something of an implied endorsement by the company. Twitter was criticized shortly before shutting down the program in 2017 for verifying known white supremacists, which users took as validation of those users’ beliefs.
The verification was intended to authenticate identity and voice, but it is interpreted as an endorsement or an indicator of importance. We recognize that we created this confusion and we need to resolve it, Twitter said at the time.
The company is considering other types of changes that can help users quickly identify an account owner. Dorsey, for example, suggested in a recent Senate hearing that the company should start labeling bots on the service, an idea he has been pitching publicly for years.
