Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, introduced a new color-coded strategy for confirming accounts on Friday—a manual procedure that might burden the company’s shrinking workforce—following an abortive attempt to modernize authentication that filled the network with a chaotic torrent of fake accounts.
Twitter’s new color-coded verification mechanism is set to be live on Friday, December 2, Musk announced.
Musk stated that Twitter would now manually authenticate accounts to avoid the flood of imposters that arose when the company opened up its verification badges to paying customers of the Twitter Blue subscription service.
Musk stated that the omnipresent blue check mark that is presently used for all verified accounts will be replaced by a system of blue, gold, and gray ticks.
Gold ticks will be sent to confirmed business accounts, while gray ticks will be distributed to “government” accounts.
Musk claimed that blue checks will henceforth be granted to “all” verified persons, celebrity or not, because the limit of what qualifies significant is “otherwise too subjective.”
Musk said that a “secondary tiny logo” may be added to an individual’s account to demonstrate they are part of an organization, offering a “longer explanation” of the system next week.
Musk highlighted human verification as a “painful, but necessary” step in combating imitation. Given the significant sacking and flight of employees since Musk took over in October, this approach is likely to put more burden on Twitter’s already overworked crew.
In response to a Twitter inquiry about whether the check marks will truly assist users distinguish between identical accounts, Musk admitted the risk that the system will not work as planned and committed to change accordingly.
He added that deliberate impersonation or deceit would result in account suspension, adding that users may identify between accounts with the same name by using organizational affiliation, biography, and follower counts. Musk stated that Twitter might display follower counts next to people’s names on tweets and allow filtering based on follower number “if it actually becomes a problem.”