Twitter to launch Verified Accounts(beta)
A lawsuit was the final thing required to push twitter into launching verified accounts now. Twitter has been dealing with a lawsuit from St. Lous Cardinals Manager Tony La Russa. The lawsuit is about an individual impersonating La Russa on Twitter. Twitter still does not have any systematic way to verify if any tweets were real or bogus.
This seems to be the reason that Twitter has announced verified accounts beta program so they do not have to handle any future lawsuits for such reasons.
Twitter Accounts Beta
Yesterday, Twitter stated the following on the La Russa case:
Reports this week that Twitter has settled a law suit and officially agreed to pay legal fees for an impersonation complaint that was taken care of by our support staff in accordance with our Terms are erroneous. Twitter has not settled, nor do we plan to settle or pay.
Actually, Twitter did not settle on this case but it pushed them to announce for these verified accounts program.
So what and how exactly will this verified account system will work? According to the Twitter blog, there will be a special seal on any account that is verirified by Twttier as being authentic. You can see this very seal in the image above, will appear at the top right of profile pages. This is targeted towards public officals, public agencies, athletes, celeberities and other high-profile indviduals.
As to how actual verification will work, it seems that Twitter will look to see if an official channel of the person in question links to his or her Twitter account from a place like an official website. This is a perfectly logical way to verify accounts, in our opinion. Details are scarce on the full plan, though.
The Verified Accounts program will begin as an experiment this summer and will expand as Twitter gets more feedback. We’re glad to finally see a system in place that will hopefully put an end to impersonators and expensive lawsuits.