Twitter has been verifying, that is giving blue ticks, to thousands of accounts on the platform after officially putting this program on hold. This revelation has been made by Mashable in its finding, which also says that thousands of accounts have been verified in recent times, which many thought was put on hold by the micro-blogging platform.
The process of handing out blue ticks to everyone and anyone was suspended in 2017 by Twitter, following an uproar for giving a blue-tick to Jason Kessler, who was one of the organisers of a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville.
The report from Mashable states that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s mother and father, a band from the 80s called Whitesnake are some of the accounts that got verified in the past four months.
But what’s more concerning from the report is that a certain ‘war room’ working as part of US President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign is also one of the 10,000 accounts that have been verified without sharing publicly available details.
Its findings also suggests that people with contacts at Twitter were still able to get their accounts verified, while regular users were denied that option after being put on hold.
Putting all doubts to bed, Twitter spoke to Mashable and said that it continues to ‘verify select accounts’ without disclosing the number of accounts getting blue ticks in the past few months.
We have paused public submissions for verification, while we focus on a new authentication and verification program. However, our teams around the world continue to work closely with trusted partners to verify select accounts.Twitter Spokesperson to Mashable
If it wasn’t for Mashable, we would have never known what Twitter was up to and how this secret verification process was happening without any public knowledge. This comes shortly after Jack Dorsey, CEO, Twitter during his visit to India in November 2018 had said that having a big follower count doesn’t matter.
And before that, he had mentioned that handing out blue ticks was meant to be a responsible exercise, which has come into question with the latest report.
At a time when social media platforms are being ordered to be transparent with processes, Twitter’s secret methods are unlikely to go down well with any country where it operates.
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