Certifiable, but not verified

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?