Twitter Verification Has Not Been Detected: The Story Of Musk and the Challenge of Dealing with Spam and Fake Accounts

There’s a reasonable argument for paid verification. Anominal maintenance fee would help fix the problem of abandoned verified accounts being hacked. (It’s not the only way, of course — you could also just require a manual renewal for inactive accounts.) For the past several years,twitter verification has been a huge mess, with inconsistent availability, poorly managed and granted on confusing grounds. But a lot of the accounts Twitter most benefits from verifying, like government agencies and activists (or other non-entertainer public figures) who are frequently impersonated by harassment campaigns, are the least able or willing to pay a $20 monthly fee. And to be blunt, Twitter needs a verified user base more than a lot of individuals need those little blue checks.

The decision to delay the rollout comes as the entire decision to charge users for verification has faced wide public backlash. In a display of defiance, some celebrities on the platform posed as Musk over the weekend and revealed a potential flaw in the “Blue Check” system.

Since its inception, Musk’s takeover has been chaotic, so it is only fitting that he will make his first change to the platform.

The verification system, part of Musk’s effort to grow the subscription business and bolster the bottom line of the company he bought for $44 billion, has been updated with several new colors and expanded check mark options.

Musk, who previously said he wants to “defeat the spam bots,” made the prevalence of spam and fake accounts on Twitter central to his effort to get out of the deal, before reversing course earlier this month and moving forward with the acquisition.

Every social network produces a unique posting style, and Twitter’s design incentivizes something slightly paradoxical: it’s one part newswire, one part nonsense. On the other hand, if you listen to the news feeds of business and politics, you will hear about customer service complaints and hurricanes, and they’re made official on the website. On the other, it’s the home of @horse_ebooks, Weird Twitter, a plethora of pseudonymous crypto evangelists and fandom stans, the Gorilla Channel tweet, and too many parody accounts to list. The first category benefits from Twitter’s default-public feed and rapid-fire text-snippet format — the second from how easily you can create accounts that aren’t tied to a real name or face and fire off bizarre jokes or hot takes.

These two different styles complement each other. The inherent seriousness of Newswire Twitter heightens the humor and absurdity of Nonsense Twitter, and the style of Nonsense Twitter bleeds into Newswire Twitter, doing things like turning government consumer protection agencies into memelords. There’s even room for the occasional dose of chaos, like DPRK News: the fake North Korean propaganda feed that’s fooled several news outlets, including The Verge.

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It sounds like an argument for Musk’s new plan. If you’re Beyoncé or McDonald’s or the Associated Press, $240 a year isn’t much to pay for preserving that sense of trust.

This proposed shakeup has not gone over well with Twitter power users. Author Stephen King, for instance, tweeted that he would be “gone like Enron” rather than pay to be verified. Still, Musk appears undeterred. The Blue Check Rapture is coming.

The blue check system did help the platform, it made a number of mistakes, but it was only one of many ways it helped prevent fraud and misinformation. There is a reason that Facebook and TikTok cribbed the blue badges for their own networks. They have been at least moderately helpful.

The decision to push back the new feature comes one day after the platform launched an updated version of its iOS app that promises to allow users who pay a monthly subscription fee to get a blue checkmark on their profiles, a feature that CEO Elon Musk has proposed as a way to fight spam on the platform.

Twitter is Blue: Cybercriminals can steal from the innocent: Musk, Bertinelli, and Kenya Airways reportedly are unaware of their impersonation

On Sunday, Musk tweeted that, “Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying ‘parody’ will be permanently suspended.” He also tweeted that a name change on Twitter will “cause temporary loss of verified checkmark.”

I’m a free of speech fanatic. and I eat doody for breakfast every day,” Silverman tweeted Saturday. Her account supports Democratic candidates.

The account was temporarily restricted on Sunday, with a warning that visitors should click through to the profile before seeing any activity from it. The comedian put her name and image into her account again, this time with her own name and image.

Television actress Valerie Bertinelli similarly changed her account name to the Twitter CEO’s, tweeting Friday that “[t]he blue checkmark simply meant your identity was verified. Scammers would have a harder time impersonating you. That no longer applies. Good luck out there! She replied to the follower who asked how the blue check mark no longer applies, writing, “You can buy a blue checkmark for $7.99 a month without checking who you are.”

After changing her profile name to Musk, Bertinelli tweeted and retweeted support for several Democratic candidates and hashtags, including “VoteBlueForDemocracy” and “#VoteBlueIn2022.”

Musk said that the warning before being suspended will no longer be given. This will be a condition of signing up to Twitter Blue, so be aware of it.

In recent months, Musk has shared conspiracy theories about the attack on Paul Pelosi, called Democrats the party of “division & hate,” compared Twitter’s former CEO to Joseph Stalin and warned that “the woke mind virus will destroy civilization.”

Within minutes, multiple Twitter accounts claiming to be Kenya Airways tweeted him. All of them offered help, but none of them appeared official. Clicking on their profiles raised red flags because they used the same logo and slogan as the accounts. “Most of their messages were well crafted,” Murphy says. The low number of followers, spelling errors, and odd choice of characters on their actual handles were some of the giveaways. The accounts included “@_1KenyaAirways” and “@kenyaairways23.”

cybercriminals can easily use social media as the perfect vehicle to target unbeknown victims, but if there is no clear and genuine method to check identities, you open up a path to impersonated accounts, which will be abused by threat actors in the search of a con.

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The company says the revamped service will cost $8 a month on the web, or $11 a month if purchased through an app on iPhones and iPads, where in-app transactions are processed through the company’s App Store, which generally levies a 30% commission.

The price tiers were announced after Musk criticized Apple over the so called “Apple tax,” a longstanding pain point for app developers and a cause of concern for regulators around the world who consider the fee excessive and financially damaging to Apple’s rivals. After Musk met with Cook at the company’s headquarters, he claimed that his row with Apple was over.

There will be three different colors for purchase: gold for companies, grey for governments and a blue check for prominent individuals.

Musk views Twitter Blue as part of his mission to make money on the platform in ways other than advertising, which accounts for about 90% of Twitter’s revenue. Major advertisers have been leaving since Musk’s chaos began.

The company has long struggled to grow its service the way larger competitors like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok have and, even before Musk took over, the company’s advertising business had been far from robust.

Questions about whether it still has the resources to deal with such a large task have not been answered by the company.

The CEO of the cybersecurity firm SocialProof Security told NPR that it might be a challenge to prevent fraud with a reduced workforce. “Scammers will quickly determine how they can overwhelm or manipulate the identity verification system to get ‘authenticated’ as an entity that they are not.”

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Esther Crawford, the product head of the subscription service effort, said on her personal account that it would be $8 per month for users to subscribe via the web platform and $11 for users to subscribe on the iOS app. Musk recently railed against Apple for charging a 30% transaction fee on top of its normal price for apps.

Some users have started to get a new note on their screen when they click on the accounts that were verified before Musk took over. It may or may not be significant.

Musk initially said the system would be up and running by November, but it was delayed several times due to safety concerns.

The additional gold and gray verification categories appear aimed at addressing some of those concerns, but it’s not clear what a requirement for individuals to pay to be verified would mean for trust in prominent individual users.

Musk has said that all verified humans will be the same blue check as the notable boundary. “Individuals can have secondary tiny logo showing they belong to an org if verified as such by that org.”