Twitter, like a lot of platforms and services, is facing something of an identity crisis. Not in the traditional, Why are we all here sense, but in the ultra-modern, Who is running the accounts on our platform, sense.

From the beginning, Twitter’s creators made the decision not to require real names on the service. It’s a policy that’s descended from older chat services, message boards and Usenet newsgroups and was designed to allow users to express themselves freely. Free expression is certainly one of the things that happens on Twitter, but that policy has had a number of unintended consequences, too.

The service is flooded with bots, automated accounts that are deployed by a number of different types of users, some legitimate, others not so much. Many companies and organizations use automation in their Twitter accounts, especially for customer service. But a wide variety of malicious actors use bots, too, for a lot of different purposes. Governments have used bots to spread disinformation for influence campaigns, cybercrime groups employ bots as part of the command-and-control infrastructure for botnets, and bots are an integral part of the cryptocurrency scam ecosystem. This has been a problem for years on Twitter, but only became a national and international issue after the 2016 presidential election.

Twitter executives are keenly aware of this problem and the company has been under pressure from legislators, regulators, and individuals to get a handle on the proliferation of spammy, deceptive, and outright fake accounts. While the company has back-end systems to detect abuse and has public policies about the ways in which automation can be used and what actions will result in account suspension, positively identifying humans on the service necessarily needs to happen on an individual basis. The overwhelming majority of Twitter usage happens on mobile platforms, and many mobile devices have built-in biometric authentication mechanisms that could be used to separate humans from machines.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said this week that he sees potential in biometric authentication as a way to help combat manipulation and increase trust on the platform.

“One of the things we’re focused on right now is how do we clearly identify the humans on the service, and even that is complicated because scripting gets more and more sophisticated. Folks can script mobile app, not just the web not just the programming interface that’s meant for developers,” Dorsey said in an interview on The Bill Simmons Podcast that was published Wednesday.

“If we can utilize technologies like Face ID or Touch ID or some of the biometric things that we find on our devices today to verify that this is a real person, then we can start labeling that and give people more context for what they’re interacting with and ideally that adds some more credibility to the equation. It is something we need to fix. We haven’t had strong technology solutions in the past, but that’s definitely changing with these supercomputers we have in our pockets now.”