Twitter Inc on Tuesday released plans for its new policy on how people are “verified” on the site, an area the company has long promised to revamp to address confusion and criticisms over the blue check-mark badges it uses to authenticate the identity of prominent accounts.

The social media company said in a blog post here that it plans to relaunch its verification program, including a new public application process, in early 2021. It said a public feedback period for the new policy would open on Tuesday and run until Dec. 8.

Twitter said it paused public submissions for verification in 2017 after hearing feedback that the program “felt arbitrary and confusing to many people.” It said at the time the check mark was being confused with “an endorsement or an indicator of importance.”

A year later, Twitter said it was putting fixes to the verification program on the back burner to focus on issues like election integrity, though it has continued to verify some accounts, such as medical experts tweeting about COVID-19 this year.

“Since then, we haven’t been clear about who can become verified and when, why an account might be unverified, or what it means to be verified,” Twitter said in the Tuesday blog post.

The company laid out more detailed criteria here for the "core types" of notable, active accounts it will verify, such as government officials, companies, nonprofits, news organizations, entertainers, sports teams, athletes and activists.

Twitter said it also may verify accounts that meet other standards such as being one of the top-followed accounts in the user’s country and having “off-Twitter notability,” which could be assessed through Google search trends, Wikipedia references or coverage in news outlets.

The company said it may cut the blue badge from accounts that severely or repeatedly violate rules, such as its policies on hateful conduct, civic integrity or glorification of violence. But it said these removals would not be automatic and would be assessed case by case.

Twitter also released proposed grounds for denying verification, for example, accounts that have been locked out for violating rules in the last six months or accounts of individuals associated with hateful content or who have been found to have committed “gross human rights violations.”

Twitter aims to introduce the final policy on Dec. 17. It also indicated plans for more ways for users to identify themselves with new account types and labels.

Source: Reuters

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US President Donald Trump appears as the first result of suggested accounts when users type "racist" into Twitter's people search, it emerged Wednesday.

The result, reported by the British news outlet The Independent and verified by AFP, highlights the intense discord around the president.

Trump has more than 80 million followers, although there is much dispute about how many of them are genuine, active human Twitter users.

Analysts said the news suggests Trump opponents, more than critics of any other Twitter account, have been labeling him as racist, although the social media giant itself did not confirm this was the case.

Trump has been facing heightened criticism for his comments during protests over police brutality but has always dismissed suggestions that he is racist.

Twitter offered little in the way of explanation, pointing out only that its search algorithms may reflect what is happening on the platform.

Trump, in the midst of a heated war with social media over what he claims is bias, recently signed an executive order calling for more oversight of internet platforms, a move which could prove difficult to enforce.

Greg Sterling, a contributing editor at the website Search Engine Land, said the result suggests that "so many people are using the words 'racist' or 'racism' to respond to or describe Donald Trump, or there's a concerted effort to associate Trump's account with those terms."

Evidently, it is also possible that a large number of supporters defending Trump from charges of racism would also use the word 'racist' in their replies.

Sterling said Twitter's ranking algorithm for individual tweets "uses a variety of signals, including how recently the tweet was published, its relevance (personalization), user engagement with the tweet, the presence of rich media (such as video or images) and several other variables."

The analyst noted however that in 2007, a concerted effort known as "Google bombing" was able to manipulate search results for then-president George W. Bush to associate him with the term "miserable failure" on the search engine until the flaw was corrected.

Kjerstin Thorson, a Michigan State University politics and social media professor, said it would require a detailed analysis to understand the reasons for the association of Trump and racism.

But Thorson said "it's not unlikely this could be an accurate representation of what people are saying" on Twitter and that bias is probably not a factor.

"The platforms have gone out of their way to avoid any appearance of bias," she said.

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A conservative social media user whose far-right memes have been praised and reposted by President Donald Trump has been kicked off Twitter for repeated copyright violations.

Logan Cook, a Kansas man who posts under the name Carpe Donktum, was permanently banned from the platform Tuesday night, days after he posted a video criticizing CNN that used doctored footage from the news channel.

The clip, which Trump retweeted last week, used footage from a CNN story from last year about the friendship of two toddlers, one Black and one white. Cook doctored the clip, set it to ominous music, and inserted a fake misspelled CNN caption reading “Terrified todler runs from racist baby,” then a clip from the original video before showing the message “America is not the problem. Fake news is the problem.”

Twitter later placed a “manipulated media” warning label on the clip. It was originally posted last year but received significantly more attention after Trump’s retweet.

Cook, who also posts his work to other platforms and websites, said in an interview that his posts are satirical and are therefore exempt from copyright rules. He said he believes Twitter was simply looking for a reason to boot him.

“They didn’t like my politics, they found an excuse to get rid of me,” he said.

Cook’s account has been temporarily suspended multiple times in the past for violations of Twitter’s copyright rules. He was also suspended for eight days last year for posting a video depicting Trump as a cowboy attacking CNN journalist Jim Acosta.

Twitter rules prohibit Cook from creating a new account to replace the old one, which had more than 270,000 followers at the time of the suspension.

Trump often retweeted Cook, who had emerged as a prominent creator of right-wing memes that uses humor, often dark, to condemn journalists and those who have criticized the president. Trump called Cook a “genius” during a meeting last year at the White House.

Trump has himself run afoul of Twitter’s rules. In March the platform placed the “manipulated media” warning on a video of Joe Biden shared by Trump.

Last month, Trump lashed out at the company after it added fact-check warnings to two of his tweets on mail-in voting. Following that back-and-forth the president vowed to add new regulations to rein in social media companies — an idea dismissed by constitutional law experts as legally difficult.