Twitter relaunching Verified, with manual authentication checks

Elon Musk says Twitter will tentatively bring back a series of color-coded "Verified" marks, complete with manual checking of applicants.

Elon Musk's plan to just give a blue "Verified" check mark icon to any Twitter user willing to pay, went as badly wrong as everyone else could and did predict. Following a flood of fake accounts started for comedic purposes, or worse, the plan was abandoned.

Now Musk has announced that he plans to bring it back as part of a new and more complex system.

Questioned about the idea of using a "gold check for companies, grey check for government, blue for individuals," Musk did briefly elaborate.

"All verified individual humans will have same blue check," he tweeted, "as boundary of what constitutes 'notable' is otherwise too subjective."

"Individuals can have secondary tiny logo showing they belong to an org if verified as such by that org," continued Musk. "Longer explanation next week."

It's not clear, then, whether there are actually to be four "verified" check marks, if a verified individual is also verified to be working with a verified company. It's also not known whether all or some of the new verification checkmarks will have to be paid for.

Despite stating that "all verified accounts will be manually authenticated," Musk gave no indication of how that can would be done. Previously, Twitter may have had the staff to do it, but Musk has been laying off huge numbers of workers, prior to starting a new hiring effort on about November 22.

23 Comments

pwrmac 59 comments · 3 Years

About 1 year ago

And many more colors to come... Who cares...

ITGUYINSD 547 comments · 5 Years

I'm VERIFIED GONE. It will be fun watching the train wreck.
Who's going to manually verify? Half his staff either were fired or jumped the sinking ship.

cia 269 comments · 21 Years

So basically the system from before he took over, but with different colors. That's innovation!!

Marvin 15336 comments · 18 Years

AppleInsider said:

Elon Musk says Twitter will tentatively bring back a series of color-coded "Verified" marks, complete with manual checking of applicants.

Questioned about the idea of using a "gold check for companies, grey check for government, blue for individuals," Musk did briefly elaborate.

"All verified individual humans will have same blue check," he tweeted, "as boundary of what constitutes 'notable' is otherwise too subjective."

"Individuals can have secondary tiny logo showing they belong to an org if verified as such by that org," continued Musk. "Longer explanation next week."

It's not clear, then, whether there are actually to be four "verified" check marks, if a verified individual is also verified to be working with a verified company. It's also not known whether all or some of the new verification checkmarks will have to be paid for.

Despite stating that "all verified accounts will be manually authenticated," Musk gave no indication of how that can would be done.

The verification doesn't all need to be done manually, except for companies, celebrities and politicians. To avoid fake accounts, they can maintain a list of celebrities and company accounts and already verified account names and any time a user tries to change their name to be similar one on the list (need to check for capital i substituting L and number 0 vs letter O), flag it for review. They can also give extra scrutiny to frequent name changes, significantly varied changes and new accounts.

Notable individuals isn't all that subjective. There's a grey area (wrestling stars, TV personalities, Youtubers) but famous actors, musicians (Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Hugh Jackman) and heavily followed accounts (Kardashians, models) are clearly notable and distinguished from everyday individuals with low followers. There's going to be more than one Tom Jones in the world and they can't all look like the same account. The famous one should be grey/gold tick. People can appeal their notable status but at the very least only allow one account to use that name and they can pay to reserve it. Pewdiepie can pay $1000 to reserve his name, even if he's only blue tick and nobody will pay that for a joke.