In November, Twitter officially confirmed it would resume its account verification process in early 2021 and shared a policy proposal. Now the company has shared all the fine details on how the restarted system will work, along with how user feedback it new Twitter verification program arriving in January 2021.
Twitter shared a draft of the new verification program policy last month, asking for feedback from the community. Now the social media service has finalized how the revived verification program will work. Twitter has detailed all the details, with input from 22,000 user surveys, in one blog post today.
First off, here’s how that input changed things:
Here are some of the areas we’ve updated in our new verification policy based on your feedback:
- We heard feedback that some criteria for a profile to be considered “complete” feel too restrictive, so we updated our definition to no longer require a profile biography or header image.
- We’ve updated our references to Wikipedia to better align with the encyclopedias’ published standards for mindfulness and article quality.
- We’ve clarified the “News” category titles with “News and Journalists” and the “Sports” category with “Sports and esports” for more inclusive information. We’ve also added a reference in our “Entertainment” category to more clearly list creators of digital content.
- We heard feedback that measuring the minimum follower count by country wasn’t always the right approach, so we updated this to by region to make our follower count requirements less susceptible to spam and more fair across all regions.
Twitter says the new system will go into effect on January 20, 2021:
We will start enforcing this policy on January 20, 2021, which is when we will automatically remove the verified badge inactive and incomplete accounts. In our new policy, a full account is defined as an account with all of the following characteristics:
- either a verified email address or phone number
- a profile picture
- a display name
For starters, six types of accounts are eligible for verification: Government Officials, Brands / Nonprofits, News, Entertainment, Sports, and Activists / Other Influential Persons.
However, Twitter is looking to expand that list, noting that some fit into the activists / others category for possible approval:
Many of you suggested adding categories for verification, including academics, scientists and religious leaders, and we plan to add special categories for these to the policy sometime next year. Until then, any of these individuals may qualify under the “Activists, Organizers, and Other Influential Persons” category. For example, since March 2020, we’ve been working with global public health authorities to identify experts tweeting about COVID-19 and have already verified hundreds of accounts as part of this partnership. These verifications will not be affected by the new policy, given the ongoing commitment to provide credible information related to the current public health crisis.
Twitter also explained how it goes about removing verification badges:
If your account is at risk of losing the verified badge, you will receive an automatic email and an in-app notification informing you of the changes required to prevent automatic removal of your blue verified badge. As long as you make these changes before January 20, 2021, your account will not lose the badge. We do not plan to automatically remove the verified badge from inactive accounts of people who are no longer alive, and are working on a way to commemorate these accounts in 2021.
Our policy also allows us to remove verification from accounts that seriously or repeatedly violate Twitter Rules. We will continue to evaluate such accounts on a case-by-case basis and will make improvements to the relationship between enforcement of our rules and verification in 2021. As always, everyone on Twitter is subject to the Twitter Rules and you can read more about our range of enforcement actions here.
From January 20 you will have access to the verification application in the Twitter app and on the internet.
We are excited to relaunch public requests for verification in 2021 through a new self-service request process that will be available on the Account Settings page on the web and in the app. The process includes asking applicants to select a category for their verified status and confirming their identity through links and other supporting material.
We plan to use both automated and human review processes to ensure that we review applications carefully and in a timely manner. We also plan to give people the opportunity to share demographic information after completing the new verification request, so that we can better measure and improve the fairness of our verification process. We will share more details on the application process shortly.
More changes are coming to improve bot accounts, memorial accounts and more.
For now you can read more about the new Twitter verification program here.
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