The blue tick of verification

What is verified?

Twitter has broken the concept it invented.

I think we all need a better understanding of how verification works across social media. Though the verification process has helped most users over time, its benefits to the elite are now starting to damage the underclass of the unticked.

Let’s start with how verified accounts are beneficial: they are prioritised in search results, they get additional filters for the messages they receive and mentions they see. You can search for tweets purely from verified accounts. And when was the last time you refreshed ‘Who to follow?’ a few times without seeing a verified account?

I know this from having access to a verified account. I’m one of three employees at The Times that can request to have any verified account under The Times suspended, tweets deleted, passwords reset. Ironically, that doesn’t include my own.

I can also request that journalists be verified to improve their social profile’s standing. This doesn’t actually offer any more information as to who is eligible or who I should be submitting for verification than the public ‘what is verification’ page, so the stance is just to submit everyone we have on staff.

When we get someone rejected it is very much ‘the account doesn’t fit the criteria’, without specifying what the criteria is. And with tens of thousands of accounts verified across the spectrum, from policeman, seemingly-occasional sportsmen, to product managers for websites, two accounts for the same thing, and total mysteries, the process has little consistency. Not saying that any of these people shouldn’t be verified, but equally, why should they?

Twitter need to ask themselves, and tell us as their customers, what verified actually means: what the blue tick is for. To the layman, verified has always been a way of guaranteeing that you are reading content actually written by (or representing) the person or business in question; that you are looking at the account of official representation.

Now, and for a time, we have had brand accounts verified. @TheTimes has been for a long time, so has every @guardian account I’ve seen, and businesses like @VirginTrains.

This serves an important purpose, especially from a customer service perspective; customers benefit from knowing they are communicating with the real thing. Journalists, sportspeople, entertainers and government employees are others that carry the blue tick of identity, to give credence to their communications. But Twitter employees are now almost universally unverified, as if to say “it’s not important”, but if it’s your system’s way of determining if an account is legitimate, isn’t that a contradiction?

Shouldn’t every Twitter account representing a real person have a verified badge if they could confirm their identity and purported to only be themselves? To this extent, is the restriction merely because of Twitter’s bottleneck?

This makes even less sense when you consider parody accounts such as the obvious @Queen_UK and the often less-obvious @IDS_MP. These accounts don’t have any tags either — putting them at the same level of ‘verification’ as Twitter’s staffers. If these novelty accounts are going to exist in the same ecosystem, and verification is Twitter’s way of ensuring users aren’t confused, but Twitter aren’t using verification sensibly, then maybe a ‘Parody’ tag is more appropriate?

Verification has seemingly gone too far and lost its meaning along the way.

In increasing from just celebrities and big brands – rife for impersonation and legal issues – to everyone up to small-town newspaper reporters with a few hundred followers, and otherwise unknown football players, the system doesn’t really serve any purpose. As more verified features (such as filtered timelines) launch to all accounts, is verified just a promotional list masquerading as something beneficial for the community?

If verification is merely vanity for VIPs, maybe a ‘Parody’ badge would be just as useful?

The more I have looked into this system, the less it makes sense to me: who should be verified, if anyone? And really what purpose does it serve?

Twitter will soon, if it hasn’t already, become a two-tier system: the verified, to be followed, and the unverified, to follow. All trends point to this: verified accounts are the content producers and us the consumers, and there’s no way to climb the ladder short of nepotism.

And if Twitter, and wider social ecosystems, don’t realise this dichotomy, it will damage them in the long run. This two-state system, left unchanged, will hurt engagement, and their platform as a whole.