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Twitter now lets anyone request a verified account
- dominotw 10y agoI am assuming twitter would start suppressing non-verifed accounts in replies/searches ect. Wouldn't this make arab spring style twitter revolutions impossible. How do you criticize your govt in countries where you could go to jail for what you say online. Just wondering if this has something to do with their notorious saudi investor.
- Arcten 10y agoBased on some of the quotes from Twitter, I don't think they will be suppressing non-verified users. It seems this is more so that people who would be deserving of verification based on the criteria that previously existed don't need to wait until Twitter notices them to get it. For example: > an account may be verified if it is determined to be of public interest. > We want to make it even easier for people to find creators and influencers on Twitter so it makes sense for us to let people apply for verification
- dawnerd 10y agoYeah, I don't know why everyone thinks this means they quality. Just because anyone can apply doesn't mean everyone will get it. It's still very much the same as before. I think the bigger draw will be towards brands. Question is, how big of a following do you need?
- poopsintub 10y agoThe approval process is done manually. I don't know how they plan or will manage to approve random people, which is why I think they won't. It might sound great in theory, but people might be disappointed when they realize how selective the process is.
- slyall 10y ago> Question is, how big of a following do you need? Looking around I find that apart from journalists (who can get verified with just a few hundred followers) few "real" people with less than 20,000 followers seem to be verified. Even if you are "important" (eg a politician, actor, businessman) then it seems to be rare the be verified at that level. Above 100,000 followers it seems very rare not to have the blue tick. All of the top 100 are verified. I did find https://twitter.com/joshingstern https://twitter.com/joshingstern who has over a million followers and is unverified plus the odd person over 100,000 So random guess I'd say 20,000 minimum to bother applying and 100,000 to guarantee being accepted.
- dawnerd 10y agoI don't know if its changed, but large accounts can lose their check if they change their name. Someone I follow had that happen a while back and they were quite annoyed by it since I guess there was no warning?
- jonknee 10y agoIt would also make abuse much harder. There are no easy solutions.
- mark242 10y agoYeah; $10 says there's a preference coming "Only show notifications from verified accounts" or "Only allow verified accounts to follow" etc etc.
- PhasmaFelis 10y ago> I am assuming twitter would start suppressing non-verifed accounts in replies/searches ect. How would that benefit them?
- dublinben 10y agoI wonder if this means they will stop using the removal of verification as way of punishing controversial users.[0] [0] https://twitter.com/nero https://twitter.com/nero
- Shank 10y agoThis account is now suspended, rather than unverified (if it was active when you posted your comment).
- atom-morgan 10y agoI believe it was. This isn't the first time he's been suspended.
- tomhoward 10y agoHe's been "permanently suspended": https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/twitter-just-permanently-suspended-conservative-writer-milo https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/twitter-just-permanen... I think it happened in the past hour.
- MBCook 10y agoYep. After he drove yet another person off Twitter by throwing his followers at them they permanently banned him. Given that they've had suspend him multiple times in the past it's amazing that he still had an account. Pathetic it took Twitter so long.
- back_beyond 10y agoWhat did he do?
- tomhoward 10y agoSupposedly he incited a harassment campaign against Ghostbusters actor Leslie Jones: http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/19/12221452/ghostbusters-leslie-jones-twitter-abuse-racist http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/19/12221452/ghostbusters-lesl...
- kilroy123 10y agoI know this is horrible, but one of my goals was to get that checkmark next to my name one day.
- niftich 10y agoThis could eventually factor into Twitter's monetization strategy. Namely, now people can self-assert to be 'important'; relevant quote here: > "We want to make it even easier for people to find creators and influencers on Twitter so it makes sense for us to let people apply for verification" These creators and influencers are the drivers of most of the user engagement to Twitter. By changing this process to be requestable instead of the Hollywood Principle ('don't call us, we'll call you'), they can gauge the level of interest that people will have in a premium level of service -- which, as of right now, is free, but selective.
- tenpies 10y agoIt also creates an incentive for people to use their real information and fill in all those additional fields that people love ignoring (date of birth, phone number). Advertisers will be quite pleased.
- bitmapbrother 10y agoI'm surprised Twitter didn't try to monetize this feature. I'm sure there are a lot of people that would pay to have that "verified" icon.
- chejazi 10y agoTwitter desperately needs this. There are far too many garbage (spam/bot) accounts on their service. I think this will help people filter out such noise a lot easier - looking forward to it!
- dvhh 10y agoI don't think it is really an issue for Twitter unless real user leave "en masse" due to spam. It helps inflating the number of users without even twitter putting a hand in it.
- mxuribe 10y agoI think this is too little, too late...or at the very least too late. I'm heading towards more and more decentralized means of posting and communicating...you know, where I can control my own fate at least a tad more. Good luck to twitter, but this is so yesterday. ;-)
- mmel 10y agoAre there decentralized social media platforms? What do you mean by decentralized? Posting on individual websites with different accounts?
- Sylos 10y agoYeah, there are decentralized social networks. A few that I know of: https://diasporafoundation.org/ https://diasporafoundation.org/ https://gnu.io/social/ https://gnu.io/social/ http://friendica.com/ http://friendica.com/ https://movim.eu/ https://movim.eu/
- spdustin 10y agoLet me add to the question: Any such network that is actually used by more than very niche peer groups, that wouldn't be just as well served by IRC, Slack or Matrix or Discord?
- niftich 10y agoYou list two open chat protocols and two proprietary services based around rich media chat. Despite bells and whistles, these are all fundamentally about chat and presence. A contemporary social network implies a profile, an asymmetric social graph between users, personal status history, an aggregate friend feed, and a content management system where users can upload and share media. Rich media chat apps can approximate some of these usecases but they aren't the same thing.
- spdustin 10y ago
- cloudjacker 10y agoverification futures plummeting in asian session
- cocotino 10y agoI was one of those sending mean stuff to that actress. I didn't do it because Milo told me to. I don't even follow Milo, he's disgusting. I did it because that actress was sperging out and I found it funny to add more fuel to the fire. Race is not relevant here, if you're a famous person on Twitter either you ignore the trolls or you become the laughing stock of them. This actress chose the latter and I sure had a lot of fun that day at her expense.
- technomancy 10y agoWhat the hell is wrong with you?
- wccrawford 10y agoBullies have always acted this way, and they're proud of it. They only stop bullying someone when they think they won't get away with it any more. Years later, I asked my bully why he stopped picking on me, and I will never, ever forget his exact words. "You got big." It wasn't some realization that he was an asshole, or that I was hurting... Just that I might hurt him back. Their conscience is so warped that it doesn't matter what you say to them, the only way to get them to change is to hurt them back. And that's sad for so many reasons.
- thisguyiknow 10y agoTwo approaches I've taken in life to bullies: appeal to authority and standing up for myself. Appeals to authority were never successful, and usually resulted in increased bullying (I was punished by the authority, and now I will punish you). Standing up for myself meant the bullies moved on to easier targets. Whether it was a verbal or physical defense, it meant that I was not going to allow them to control me. I didn't become a bully when I fought back.
- dang 10y agoPlease don't reply to egregious comments by breaking the site guidelines, difficult though that can be to resist. Instead, you can flag the comment by clicking on its timestamp to go to its page, then clicking 'flag' at the top. We monitor such flags and take action based on them.
- known 10y ago"There are only two ways of telling the complete truth--anonymously and posthumously." --Thomas Sowell
- Asooka 10y agocough HackerNews cough hellbans with no warning cough.
- dang 10y agoYour account isn't banned. Except in cases of spammers and serial trolls we nearly always tell people publicly that we've banned them. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12127190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12127190 and marked it off-topic.
- hclivess 10y agoLeslie just banned me on Twitter lol
- jarofgreen 10y agoIt sounds like they are basically going for a Real Name policy? I wonder how that will go, as problems with that have been well documented on other platforms.
- awt 10y agoLesson: don't be a twitter share cropper.
- nikolay 10y agoClueless Twitter again - sell verification for $99.95 for the first year and $9.95/year thereafter.