Aside from Elon Musk’s bot-baiting, many individuals have called for adjustments to how Twitter recognizes accounts and what can be done to identify which ones are more legitimate than others. Engineer Jane Manchun Wong has created a Twitter label that would identify users that have a confirmed phone number. She also mentioned another test feature that displays tweet view counts, which some users currently have access to for their own tweets under the name “analytics.” However, she said that it is unclear if this would be confined to the author or accessible to everybody.
Linking an account to a number is one method to emphasize that it was made with more care than the simplest macro, and it might be used to filter out which tweets display prominently or pass through the different layers of quality filters. Twitter also enables users to link the same phone number with up to ten distinct accounts, and developers may flag automated accounts to let users know that each post isn’t made by a person.
Verified “blue check” accounts must already have a verified phone number or email address. When then-CEO Jack Dorsey discussed ambitions to make verification available to everyone, he referenced letting individuals verify information about themselves, which might have been similar to how businesses like Airbnb and Tinder utilize phone numbers as part of their account verification procedures.
However, encouraging users to connect phone numbers to their accounts and show the status raises the problem of data security. Twitter published the specifics of an incident on August 5th that enabled an attacker to identify 5.4 million user names connected with certain phone numbers and email addresses. According to the firm, the privacy weakness was introduced in a June 2021 update, wasn’t disclosed to Twitter until January, and Twitter didn’t realize the information had been taken until July when media rumors spread that someone was attempting to sell the database.
