TWITTER VERIFIED CHECK MARK TEXT VERIFICATION

Twitter has previously relied on the badges as an important signal affecting all of those areas – for example, using verification to decide to boost a public figure’s tweet into a user’s timeline. The removal of verification badges at such a wide scale has the potential to disrupt systems across Twitter’s website, including its recommendation algorithms, spam filters and help center requests. After a surge in impersonation accounts in November, when the company began awarding check marks to those willing to pay $8, Twitter employees were not immediately able to distinguish legacy verified check marks from those newly awarded, The Post reported. Meanwhile, the company has had only a loose handle on the interplay between old and new check marks. Twitter has repeatedly incurred outages after making tweaks to its code, including this month, something that has prompted Musk to refer to the site as “brittle.” The massive changes to Twitter’s verification system risk disrupting the site, according to two former employees, who spoke with The Post on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

Twitter CEO Elon Musk and Twitter did not respond to requests for comment. News organizations including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post said Thursday they won’t pay for verification for their organizations or reporters, although the New York Times said there may be some rare exceptions. Twitter could also delay the timeline for the rollout. It was not clear whether all accounts will lose their verification or if some may be grandfathered in. Twitter now requires a valid phone number and payment to attain the blue check, betting that spammers will not shell out large amounts of cash to flood the site with scams. Those paying roughly $8 a month for Twitter Blue, which includes a handful of other features, will also be among the small subset of accounts boosted starting April 15 to Twitter’s main timeline, the “For You” page. “On April 1st, we will begin winding down our legacy verified program and removing legacy verified check marks,” the company tweeted. Twitter said last week it will begin removing legacy badges, instead reserving the blue check marks for paying customers. “It became shorthand for ‘we know the identity of that source,” he added. “That doesn’t mean you rush right to air with it necessarily, but it made a huge difference,” said the former host of “Reliable Sources.” He said that Twitter verification gained a cultural meaning, indicating who the messenger of the information was.

Twitter verified check mark text