Twitter To Verify Accounts This Summer
Last week Tony La Russa, the Manager of the baseball team St Louis Cardinals filed a lawsuit against Twitter when he found out that someone created a fake account under his name and was posting obscene messages.
Biz Stone, the co founder of Twitter announced on his blog today that the lawsuit was an “unnecessary waste of judicial resources bordering on frivolous”. He further adds that Twitter has no intention to settle the lawsuit (a retort to alleged reports that Twitter has already settled the lawsuit).
However, this has got Twitter on its toes trying to launch a verified accounts feature that it will pilot run this summer.
So how does that work?
According to the Twitter blog, they will put a special seal on accounts that are verified by Twitter as being authentic. This is targeted toward public officials, public agencies and high-profile individuals. This seal will appear at the top right of profile pages.
Some of the readers aren’t really happy at the prospect of this.
One reader vents his frustration saying:
Why in hell should Twitter be held responsible for verifying accounts? Is Google to be held responsible if I got Dr.Dre@gmail.com or KanyeWest@gmail.com first, when in fact I am neither Dr. Dre or Kanye West? And what about us “regular” people? If our names aren’t touted as “brands” then I guess maybe we don’t have a case?
It’s not the first time someone is impersonating a celebrity on Twitter. Kanye West, the famous rapper, was quite angry with twitter when he found out that someone created a fake account pretending to be him.
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Interesting. I actually would want to have my account verified as an individual but what about if this does grow, will it be useful for a single person to have maybe 3 twitter accounts verified instead of one? this would be good since some companies have different types of brands, for example multiple users from comcast has twitter accounts, how will they be thought of as ‘verified’
Crederity, is a Inc., a web-based trust-building company that offers online identity and credential verification to people-powered companies. We just opened our #twitter identity verification service for private beta. Go to Crederity.com! for free sign ups