Microblogging site, Twitter, has confirmed that it is working on a verification badge for users that have verified the phone number attached to their Twitter account.
This was pointed out by App researcher, Jane Manchun Wong, after she dug up a label that would add some sort of mark to profiles with verified phone numbers. She then made the revelation via a tweet on her verified Twitter account. Wong’s revelation has been confirmed by Twitter, via an interview with TechCrunch, where it was revealed that the aim of the badge is to “allow people to add context to their accounts.”
According to Wong, the new “verified phone number” feature will appear as a grey label on the bottom half of a person’s Twitter bio.
Wong also noted another test feature showing view counts for tweets. Although, some users already have access to this feature for their own tweets – under the label of “analytics”, she said it is unclear if this would be limited to the author, or it will be visible to everyone.
For a while now, Elon Musk has been vocal about the number of bots, and fake accounts on Twitter, accusing Twitter board of downplaying the number of such accounts that exists on Twitter. Musk claims that a large number of accounts on Twitter are fake or bot accounts, and alleging that as a violation of the deal contract. Experts are of the opinion that the use of verification badge might go a long way at distinguishing between a bot account, and an account belonging to a real person.
Twitter has been in a number of security situation, with the recent one making waves earlier this month. On the 5th of August, Twitter announced a security situation where someone was able to get email addresses or phone numbers related to 5.4 million accounts on the app.
The vulnerability that made the situation possible happened through an update in June 2021, but it was only discovered in January through Twitter’s bug bounty program. However, someone had exploited the crack, stole some information, and tried to sell the database
In May, Twitter agreed to a $150 million settlement for improperly using phone numbers and email addresses collected for two-factor authentication in its ad targeting, showing how leaky the data can be.