Let’s Talk About Twitter Verification!

You may recall that, back in April, Elon Musk announced that one of his plans was to authenticate all real humans" on Twitter. This was his plan to somehow magically get rid of spam. As we noted at the time, doing so would create some pretty serious questions regarding freedom of speech on the platform when it comes to protecting anonymous voices.

Now that Musk officially owns Twitter, and has brought in a bunch of his friends to show the existing team who's boss now, there were some reports suggesting the first big" new feature rollout is to charge people for being verified. As with anything like this, these are coming from leaks within the company, so the information is not entirely consistent and is very, very likely subject to changes. But Casey Newton had the story saying that the plan was to only provide the verification badges to people who paid for Twitter's subscription tier, Twitter Blue, which currently costs $4.99/month. Alex Heath, over at The Verge, had more details, including that Elon is actually toying with charging $20/month for verification.

Also, that the team tasked with rolling out this feature has been given basically a week to roll it out... or be fired.

The directive is to change Twitter Blue, the company's optional, $4.99 a month subscription that unlocks additional features, into a more expensive subscription that also verifies users, according to people familiar with the matter and internal correspondence seen by The Verge. Twitter is currently planning to charge $19.99 for the new Twitter Blue subscription. Under the current plan, verified users would have 90 days to subscribe or lose their blue checkmark. Employees working on the project were told on Sunday that they need to meet a deadline of November 7th to launch the feature or they will be fired.

For now let's leave aside the, um, questions raised by demanding such a product (one that involves a lot of people's private information and payment info...) be designed, built, tested, and rolled out in a week (and what kind of morale deflater it is to have a do this stupid thing now or we fire you" decree). Instead, let's talk a little about the Twitter verification process.*

Last year, we had a content moderation case study all about Twitter's verified blue check system. Why is the verification system about content moderation, you might ask, and the case study more or less reveals the unintended consequences of certain social media design choices.

Originally, the verification badge had nothing to do with content moderation, and nothing to do with status." It was a safety tool. Well-known people were running into issues with imposters and scammers pretending to be them, and the solution that Twitter came up with had nothing to do with status or business models. It was about making the platform safer for users so they didn't get scammed or tricked or misled, and also allowing public figures to feel safer using the platform.

This is what trust & safety" is about.

The entire point was just to say this person is who they say they are." Nothing more. As the case study details, what became trickier about it was that users started to see it not just as a badge of authentication, but also an endorsement by the company, which became a problem when some very horrible people not only had badges (which was reasonable under the purpose of the program), but then started harassing users. Users took that as Twitter endorsing" the harasser, which started to drive people away from Twitter.

Once again, it became a trust and safety issue, though in a different way.

Partly because of that, Twitter went back to the drawing board to redesign the program, and adjusted its existing policy to say that it might remove the verification badge for accounts whose behavior does not fall within" acceptable use guidelines.

The company then spent years trying to redesign the verification program, and only opened it last year to a more narrow audience. Even though the company spent years working on it, the relaunch was quickly beset with problems, as a bunch of fake accounts made it through the verification process. Others called out how the new process, which was targeted at journalists, was much more difficult for others (such as activists) who really needed the verification for their own protection.

So, basically, verification is not as simple as people make it out to be, and getting it wrong can have pretty serious consequences (mostly unintended). Yes, taking four years for Twitter to redesign its system seems like way too long. But, doing the whole thing in a week seems much, much riskier.

As for the users, I'm sure that there is some subset for whom it's worth it to pay, but it seems like a pretty small market, especially at $20/month. Not only that, but making users pay for verification actually decreases its value as a status symbol (for those who believe it's a status symbol) because now it goes from Twitter thought I was important" to I'm dumb enough to waste $240 a year on making myself look important." And, um, one is better than the other.

That's not to say there aren't plenty of interesting ideas that Twitter could come up with for a subscription plan. Some friends I know who already subscribe to Twitter Blue say that it has a lot of useful features. But verification was built for trust & safety purposes, not revenue purposes, and shifting it from one bucket to the other seems like a serious classification error with some potentially big consequences.

It seems like rather than figuring out how best to squeeze money out of people desperate for clout, a better approach would be to create more useful features to make the site better. But, then, what do I know?

* As a disclaimer, I am verified on Twitter. I never asked, nor applied, for it. It just showed up one day. I was fine without it, and see no direct benefit to myself from it, and the only impact it seems to have actually had is that sometimes people who are mad at me make fun of me having a blue check mark as if it makes me think I'm special. It doesn't. It's just there. If it goes away, I will not miss it.