45 Verifying Twitter Identity
One relatively common form of misinformation is the fake celebrity retweet. Sometimes this happens by accident–a person mistakenly retweets a parody account as real. Sometimes this happens by design, with an account faking a retweet. Here are some tips to make sure that the tweet you are looking at on Twitter is from the person you are attributing it to.
However, unlike Facebook, Twitter does not enforce a “real name” policy, which makes it easy for one person to run multiple accounts, and to run accounts under different names. In fact, an important part of Twitter culture is the constellation of parody accounts, bots, and single issue accounts that amuse and inform Twitter subscribers.
At the same time, it’s easy to get confused. As an example, consider the account of Representative Jack Kimble. Here’s a typical tweet:
If you’re a liberal, looking at this tweet may get your blood boiling. How can anyone possibly believe this? Especially a Representative?
Scanning the Twitter bio doesn’t help.
Here we see that he’s from the 54th District of California and he’s got a book out. Now if we’re reading carefully we might notice some fishy things here: his book, Profiles in Courageousness, seems like a parodic re-titling of Jack Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage. “E pluribus unum,” which means “From the many, one,” is translated to “1 nation under God”.
Oh, also: California only has 53 districts.
Unfortunately, you’ll likely be in such a huff about the comments that you won’t notice any of these things. So what is a general purpose indicator that you need to slow down? In most cases, it’s going to be the absence of a “verified account” marker.
Checking Verified Accounts
As a counter-example to “Representative Kimble,” here’s a real representative, Jason Chaffetz, from Utah’s 3rd District.
That little blue seal with the check mark (the “verified badge”) indicates that this is a “verified identity” by Twitter—Twitter asserts that this person has proved they are who they say they are.
Who gets to get verified? It’s a bit unclear. Twitter puts it this way:
An account may be verified if it is determined to be an account of public interest. Typically this includes accounts maintained by users in music, acting, fashion, government, politics, religion, journalism, media, sports, business, and other key interest areas.
However, all members of Congress and senior administration officials qualify for such status. So do most major public figures and prominent writers. If you don’t see the blue badge, either disregard the tweet as suspicious, or do further research.
One additional note: sometimes people try to fake these indicators; an example is faking a verification symbol in a header.
This user has used their background image to place a verification badge next to their name. To steer clear of these sort of hacks, always view the badge in the sidebar or small “hover” card, not the header. To be extra sure it’s legit, hover your cursor ov