What does 'Verified' mean, anyway?
Are you who you say you are? Or are you just really important?
Twitter have recently updated their verification system, providing new criteria for receiving ‘the blue tick’ in response to the widespread criticism of ‘confusion’ around its use and purpose. Have these updates cleared up the confusion? Or does the problem run deeper?
According to Twitter, a ‘verified’ tick attached to an account “lets people know that an account of public interest is authentic.” To receive this verified status, your account must be “authentic, notable and active.”
Seems simple enough, right?
Let’s take a step back for a second. How did we get here? Why do we need these blue ticks? Why do we want them? What was their inspiration?
Verification and authentication are tied to authorship. We have used similar means for centuries to ensure the authenticity of a message or communication is being made by who we believe it to be. A comparable tool is the wax stamp that would seal letters, used by royalty and nobility. A seal would confirm that it is both from the intended sender, indicated by the design of the seal, and that they were the only reader, indicated by the seal being unbroken.
The need arose from communication that was no longer face to face. Unless we hear the words come out of someone’s mouth, we have instinctively looked to verification to confirm their words as their own.
This is all well and good, but it doesn’t explain what issues there are with online verification. Or does it? Let’s consider some of the implications from a design perspective.
The first aspect of verification that is important to consider historically is how closely it has always been tied to social status. When wax seals were most popular prior to the industrial revolution, those who used them weren’t just socially important, but also politically important.
When an account is ‘verified’ on social media, the implication isn’t only that they are who they say they are, but also that they are important.
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and any other platform you can think of operate their verified user policy the same way. As with Twitter, they all explain that it is through a vetting process of public presence, be it the news, publications or other media that these platforms deem legitimate, that someone may become ‘verified’ as themselves.
However, when they do become verified on a platform, their social status is no longer substantiated by these external publications, but by that blue tick itself. People put considerable effort into acquiring the blue tick status on major platforms, as they believe it to be in itself the marker of importance, or ‘clout’.
By putting this system in place, major platforms have created a much more powerful, and sinister, tool than merely a digital ‘seal’. These platforms now wield both a carrot, of the verified status, and a stick, by taking it away. The ‘donkeys’ who wish to engage in public debate are only able to do so within the platform’s rules that these mark out.
Further down Twitter’s info page on verification:
“We may also remove the blue badge from accounts that are found to be in severe or repeated violation of the Twitter Rules.”
I personally find this concept intriguing. On the surface, it appears as though Twitter, or indeed any other major platform, is no longer confirming someone is who they say they are should they violate the rules of their platform. This is what this act should mean, by Twitter’s own definition of a verified account.
What it actually means is that Twitter is taking away your carrot and replacing it with a stick. Twitter has decided you don’t deserve to be important. Twitter has decided you are just like everyone else.
I’m not saying that people who get un-verified aren’t deserving of some kind of action. The most common cause for this is spreading conspiracy, disinformation, and incitement of violence, which on the surface I and many others welcome.
But no one elected Twitter to police public discourse. There is no real means of confirming Twitter are capable of managing this responsibility, and there is no structure in place should we, the public who are engaging in discussion, feel at any point that they have done an inadequate job.
If we live in a democracy, surely we should get to decide what information is allowed, and who is allowed to participate?
Again, I will return to my early question: how did we get here? The answer, I believe, is in design.
The wax seal was never used as a tool of public discussion. It was for individual letters between a sender and recipient. The protocol for that kind of conversation relies on knowledge of who you are speaking with.
Not only that, but in a time of limited means of communication, the accountability of those who reported information was very important. There was no other way of knowing what happened during an event than from the word of someone in a letter. You have to trust the people who write to you to know what is happening around you. You had to rely on the quality of information when quantity was lacking.
What an author’s wax seal gave you, therefore, was the context of the information.
This is exactly what a blue tick also provides. The tick tells the reader the context that Twitter not only knows this account represents who they claim to be, but also that they are ideologically aligned with Twitter. In other words: you can trust them.
But do you trust them? Do you trust Twitter? Or Facebook? Instagram?
Perhaps you do, but why rely on it? The fact is, we don’t need to trust platforms, or their blue disciples, to verify information for us. If we want to find something out, we have the entire internet to research, gain evidence, and build understanding. We don’t need to rely on quality of information in the same way, when we have so much more quantity than ever before.
This isn’t to say that authorship is entirely irrelevant as context - only that it isn’t universally essential as context.
Verification was only ever a stopgap due to lack of information, and never an ideal mechanism for verifying information. And with its new use as a carrot of social status that can be taken away, its primary function as a tool for accountability has been removed.
The internet provides us with a many more functions of context than just an author: evidence. And lots of it. And yet somehow we find disinformation and conspiracies to be an even greater problem than they were before.
Perhaps this is because we are using the same systems to verify the truth of information as we were before the digital age. Back when, you know, disinformation and conspiracies weren’t exactly a non-issue. For example this article I found two seconds after typing ‘USSR’ into Google.
Maybe a redesign is in order: one that focuses less on who said it, and more on what ‘it’ really is.
Thanks for reading!
This article is the first in the Turtles (all the way down!) newsletter series. I hope this brief foray into how a small blue tick can have such major social repercussions in digital spaces sheds some light on why it is so important to discuss the relationship between digital design and the most pressing issues of the modern world. If you liked the read and would enjoy more, feel free to subscribe!