Verified accounts are not “important”, they are what is says on the tin: verified. The feature is meant to help people who were impersonated, not famous. That n

Verified accounts are not “important”, they are what is says on the tin: verified. The feature is meant to help people who were impersonated, not famous. That nuance got lost very fast on celebrities who like any pretext to feel more important, but I think we would loose a lot by not understanding what it means. For instance, employee accounts on any platform have a de facto similar role because they can be used to authenticate both company message, and more. Verified accounts are those likely victim of abuse, and I believe that is it likely that if you suffer from impersonation, you also suffer from trolls. Verified accounts are the most likely candidate for the need for more protection. Something else that is at stake, and something that you are explicitly asking for – but I think it‘s a serious mistake: the dichotomy between celebrities and commoners. There never were a clear gap, there, but the idea that being on TV, in the press, or owning land made you special has proven dangerous. Having a gradient from moderately interesting anyones, to popular people within their social context, to relevant expert, opinion leader, up to professionally famous people, that “smoothness” of fame is a great, empowering change that the Internet has brought and made visible. I think we need to understand that, and adapt (currently blunt) disclosure rules to that smoothness: you can make something a little bit more famous than they are, but you can’t shift them by several orders of magnitude because the attention, grief, consequence of that is something that needs to be learnt, understood, accepted.