
Internal Emails Show Twitter Struggled to Interpret Its Rules Unverifying Trolls - minimaxir
https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/internal-emails-show-twitter-struggled-to-interpret-its-own
======
neaden
The core problem is that verification comes with perks. If veryifing someone
just meant "Yep, it's that person alright" I don't think there would be all
these issues with twitter saying "Yep, this is really the spokesperson of the
KKK" or something similar. But because there are perks it comes off more as
Twitter endorsing the person as someone who has interesting things to say.

~~~
crescentfresh
I don't twitter. What are the perks?

~~~
thinkingemote
In the article it lists a few, such as better SEO, spam white listing etc

~~~
ImSkeptical
Why wouldn't they just have a blue check for "identity verified" and a green
check for "Valued Community Member". Give your racists, weirdos, trolls, etc
the blue check and no perks if you can identify them, and reporters,
politicians, whatever the green check and the perks.

I really hate how big companies get paralyzed over problems like this. A small
group would have solved this the same day the realized it was an issue.

~~~
wklauss
> Why wouldn't they just have a blue check for "identity verified" and a green
> check for "Valued Community Member".

Because then we will be having this same conversation about Twitter
mismanagement of green checks. Identity is not the problem. What bigots,
racist, nazis and political actors are demanding is status, not recognition.
Milo followers know he is who he say he is.

~~~
StavrosK
But that's exactly the problem. Twitter started the blue check as verification
and then it slowly transitioned to mean "valuable member", through, I imagine,
employees taking small steps at a time ("hey, we only blue check famous
people, so we might as well report that on the shareholder meetings").

Thus, the blue check slowly became something different than intended, and
realizing this and having a second check for that ("blue is only for
verification!") would have solved the problem.

------
gozur88
Twitter could have avoided so many problems by sticking to verification as
they advertised it - that the blue check mark just meant you were who you said
you were and nothing more. It should have provided no benefits other than
followers know they're following the right person.

Using it as a stamp of approval is an absolute minefield for a public company.
So far the competition is, well, incompetent, but eventually somebody's going
to come along and take advantage of these kinds of mistakes.

~~~
topgunsarg
They could just have a second badge like LinkedIn does for "influencer" or
something of the like, that would convey the current benefits of the
verification badge.

~~~
jxramos
Good point, seems like a failure to decouple independent concepts. Bad design,
bad implementation.

~~~
ForHackernews
Seems par for the course for the company that's always mixed data and
metadata.

------
malvosenior
They may have agonized about removing Milo’s check but they’ve been handing
them out willy nilly for a few years now. There are tons of business people
and friends of Twitter employees with the blue check. People who would not be
known outside of their social circle yet they get “verified” as if they were
under any risk of impersonation whatsoever.

My personal observation is that these random blue check people skew very heavy
to the left of the political spectrum, but I have no data to back that up.
Certainly the people I’ve seen are much less notable than Milo though.

~~~
fatwa
You can click on any Trump tweet and see a myriad of bad jokes from blue-
checked journalists who live in New York

------
wybiral
Not everyone is eligible for verification.

That naturally puts them in the position of having to prioritized
verification, but based on what?

If it's only meant to prove identity then they should follow the lead of
Keybase and verify yourself by proving control over other accounts.

------
matt4077
I feel like these quotes simply show a reasonable, deliberative process. Of
course there was confusion regarding the meaning of verification–they admitted
as much. These emails are exactly what I would have expected.

They also do not contradict Twitter's public statements. Quote: “verification
was meant to authenticate identity & voice, but it is interpreted as an
endorsement or an indicator of importance.”

Is that not exactly what happened?

------
glasz
the verification check is completely useless for me. it has forever been. is
that just me?

everything twitter management does is just complete selfish bullshit. they
should be a 50 people operation and do one thing: publish 140 char messages
and show ads. problems solved.

------
KasianFranks
Maybe because it was created by trolls, voyeurs, like facebook. Unlike Google.

------
retox
One man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter.

------
thinkingemote
Just a query, forgive me, why not use the word "ban" instead of perma-suspend.
A suspension means a kind of state between other states. Permanent suspension
doesn't make sense to me with this context. perhaps it's an American English
thing?

~~~
topspin
"perhaps it's an American English thing"

It's an American mental gymnastics thing. When we're not inventing euphemisms
to obscure our purpose we use straightforward words like "ban".

~~~
QAPereo
To be fair that’s hardly American... it’s human. Remember the “Prosperity
Sphere” for one notable example?

~~~
mattmanser
The Americans are notorious for it though, especially anything to do with
invading a country or justifying killing a bunch of innocent people.

~~~
waterhouse
Orwell seems to indicate that some of the British were notorious for it at one
point, too. From "Politics and the English Language"[1]:

"Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian
totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your
opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he
will say something like this:

‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which
the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a
certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable
concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian
people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the
sphere of concrete achievement.’

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls
upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the
details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap
between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively
to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink."

[1]
[http://orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit](http://orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit)

