Twitter mobile app. Image: Sattalat phukkum/Shutterstock
Twitter’s verification process is under a magnifying glass as critics cite treatment of known white supremacists.
On Tuesday 7 November, Twitter unleashed a barrage of complaints after it verified the account of Jason Kessler, indicating his prominence in the public sphere.
The company was blasted for verifying Kessler, a known white supremacist who used the platform to spread his ethos and organise rallies such as the Charlottesville Unite The Right event in August, which resulted in the death of counter-protester Heather Heyer.
When The Daily Beast reached out to Twitter for comment, the company directed journalists to its verification policies, explaining that a blue tick is awarded when an account is deemed “of public interest”.
A vague policy
While this sounds straightforward on paper, Twitter’s own adherence to these policies is fuzzy at best.
If verification is seemingly just to identify public figures as opposed to lending them an air of superiority, then why, for example, did the firm remove Milo Yiannopoulos’ verification rather than banning him outright earlier last year?
Kessler had deleted his account previously after insulting the late Heyer’s appearance and linking to extreme neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer.
He received verification just 26 days after Twitter rolled out its much-heralded calendar of changes to fix the rampant and ugly harassment issues within the site.
White nationalist Richard Spencer is also verified.
Confusion around Twitter verification
Twitter said its verification process is meant to “authenticate identify and voice” but is today interpreted as an endorsement or an indicator of importance, and it is pausing all general verifications while the company tries to resolve the matter.
CEO Jack Dorsey and general manager of consumer product at Twitter, Ed Ho, both responded to the uproar.
Dorsey admitted: “We realised some time ago the system is broken and needs to be reconsidered.”
We should’ve communicated faster on this (yesterday): our agents have been following our verification policy correctly, but we realized some time ago the system is broken and needs to be reconsidered. And we failed by not doing anything about it. Working now to fix faster. https://t.co/wVbfYJntHj
— jack (@jack) November 9, 2017
Ho agreed that the company was too slow in its response.
We should have stopped the current process at the beginning of the year. We knew it was busted as people confuse ID verification with endorsement. Have to fix the system, pausing until we do. https://t.co/HSLbJOG2AN
— Ed Ho (@mrdonut) November 9, 2017
He also put a question to users about how best the verification process could be altered in the future.
Larger question for everyone on Twitter: Should it ever appear that Twitter is endorsing anyone with something as prominent as a blue check mark or should we only authenticate info in a profile?
— Ed Ho (@mrdonut) November 9, 2017
Twitter mobile app. Image: Sattalat phukkum/Shutterstock
