Twitter Tests Special Tag To Identify Verified Accounts With Legitimate Phone Numbers

Twitter tests a special tag for phone number verification. (photo: doc. pixabay)

JAKARTA- In addition to the bot fight with Elon Musk, Twitter has also asked many people to change how it identifies accounts and what it can do to find out which one is more legitimate than the other.

Reported by The Verge, now engineer Jane Manchun Wong has dug up a Twitter label that will tag accounts with verified phone numbers. He also noted another test feature that shows the number of views for tweets, which some users already have access to their own tweets under the label "analytics." However, he said it was unclear whether this would be limited to writers or visible to everyone.

Linking an account to a number is one way to highlight that it was made with more effort than the simplest macro and can be used to filter out which tweets stand out the most or make them go through different levels of quality filters.

Twitter also allows people to have the same phone number associated with up to ten different accounts, while developers can label automated accounts to let people know that there's no human behind every post.

Verified “blue tick” accounts are already required to have a verified phone number or email address. When then-CEO Jack Dorsey talked about plans to allow verification for everyone, he mentioned asking people to verify facts about themselves, which may be similar to how services like Airbnb and Tinder use phone numbers as part of their account verification process.

However, encouraging users to link a phone number to their account and display a status means securing that data becomes a problem. On August 5, Twitter announced details of an incident that allowed attackers to find 5.4 million account names associated with specific phone numbers and email addresses.

By the company's own account, the privacy flaw was introduced in the June 2021 update, wasn't reported to Twitter until January, and Twitter didn't know the information had been stolen until July when media reports circulated that someone was trying to sell the database.

The 2020 hack that allowed attackers to tweet from the accounts of Jack Dorsey and Joe Biden about Bitcoin came after the attackers engineered their way of using Twitter's internal tools.

Another report by Bloomberg noted that several contractors had used Twitter tools to spy on celebrity accounts, and earlier this month, a former employee was convicted of spying after he used his position to "access users' email addresses, phone numbers, and birth dates." critical of the Saudi government."

In May, Twitter approved a $150 million settlement for the use of improperly collected phone numbers and email addresses for two-factor authentication in its ad targeting, showing just how leaky the data is.

In the run-up to the midterm elections, there is pressure to make sure the information posted on social media is from a real person or at least someone who actually exists in the country they claim to be. Phone number tags can play a role in assessing the trustworthiness of an account, but it's not clear if or when Twitter will be able to roll it out widely.