Twitter bringing back verification, this time with clearer guidelines

By Maya Shwayder June 8, 2020

Twitter users might finally have an answer to a nagging question: “How many followers does it take to get verified?”

The answer, previously, was “who knows?” But now, according to social media secret finder Jane Wong and TechCrunch, Twitter will have a new “request verification” option that will specifically lay out what it takes to get verified.

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Twitter is working on “Request Verification” ????

(I’m not Twitter employee. I’m not tech support) pic.twitter.com/ED58QsD7kM

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) June 7, 2020

When contacted by Digital Trends, Twitter “declined to comment beyond” what was reported by Wong. It also declined to specify when this new system would be rolling out or what the guidelines would be.

Up until about three years ago, users were able to request verification, but the standards by which Twitter judged who was worthy of the coveted blue check mark and who wasn’t were rather opaque and seemed haphazard.

As TechCrunch reported, after a kerfuffle ensued in 2017 in response to neo-Nazi Jason Kessler being verified, Twitter removed the “request verification” tab and said it would rethink its system.

Twitter confirmed to TechCrunch that Wong’s finding was accurate but wouldn’t comment further on how or when the new guidelines would emerge.

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Twitter has reportedly suspended signups for Twitter Blue

Twitter Blue menu option on a white screen background which is on a black background.

The start of Elon Musk's tenure as owner of Twitter has not been without its struggles and chaos. And so far, the chaos Twitter currently finds itself in shows no signs of letting up anytime soon.

So it seems fitting that the latest news on the Twitter front is that signups for the microblogging platform's $8-per-month Twitter Blue subscription have reportedly been suspended. On Friday, Forbes reported that new signups for Twitter's newly revamped Blue subscription have apparently been disabled, having "verified that users have not been able to sign up to the service for more than an hour," and also citing that the option to sign up for Blue on the iOS app had disappeared as further proof of the suspension. The Verge also noted that some users may still see the option to subscribe, only to then be met with an error message. One of the editors at Digital Trends said the option to sign up for the service is just missing from his iOS app's menu, noted that it had been like that "since at least 8 p.m. PT last night," and shared the following screenshot:

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Elon Musk.

In the middle of writing an article about Twitter's initial rollout of a new gray check mark verification badge, we noticed something odd: Twitter accounts that had the new gray check marks only minutes earlier were suddenly without them again. So what happened?

Elon Musk apparently happened. Mere hours after his newly purchased social media platform began its rollout of a new gray check mark in an effort to help clarify which high-profile accounts were actually verified, the new gray check marks began disappearing from various accounts, evidently at Musk's behest. Just take a look at this tweet conversation between web video producer Marques Brownlee and Musk:

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Twitter to revamp verified accounts with a new label

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