Recently, I read a rant about an account that I follow on Twitter for great content complaining that it couldn’t get verified.
Verified accounts, I’m sure you know, have a little badge with a checkmark beside their name and it’s one step that you can use to help verify that the posts from the account have a certain level of credibility.
I guess, in the world of social media, this serves as a source of credentialing. The criteria, from Twitter, states:
Quite frankly, I did feel that the account in question was worthy and I was surprised to read that the request was denied.
I wondered what it takes. Anyone/thing can submit a request to be verified at https://verification.twitter.com/welcome.
So, I checked it out.
I got to step 2 before I got stopped. Twitter wanted to know my birthday. With age comes wisdom? Just for the heck of it, I inserted it and continued on. Then, it gets kind of personal requiring scanned documents.
At this point, I lost interest. There’s not a chance that I would be verified by my own request anyway. So, while I might be certifiable, I decided not to be verifiable.
Now, in the big scheme of things, I guess I do give an extra sense of credibility to accounts that have been verified. But that doesn’t always give them a pass. There has been gossip and outright incorrect information posted from these accounts so, as always, reader beware.
How about you? Do you give extra credibility to these accounts?
doug --- off the record 