Twitter today confirmed to TechCrunch that it is testing a new profile badge for accounts who have verified their phone numbers. The goal of the experiment, according to the report, is to “allow people to add context to their accounts.”
This might be used to ensure that a user who has the phone verification badge is not a bot. The company said this is one of the ways that help people find credible info and gives more information about different types of accounts.
It went on to say that verification is only one step in the process, and that it is presently only testing phone number verification with an opt-in setting. The report didn’t state the regions where Twitter is carrying out the experiment nor who will see the badge.
App researcher Jane Manchun Wong pointed out the feature last week, discovering the Twitter label that would appear on accounts with a verified phone number.
To help Twitter with the account verification process, verified “blue check” accounts must have either a phone number or email address linked.
The verified phone number badge is shown in the tweet attached above. The feature appears to display a grey label on the bottom half of a person’s Twitter bio. It is seen right below the profile category and above the following count.
The badge will only be available for verified users on the platform. Wong has also claimed that Twitter might show view counts for posts on the platform, however, it is not clear whether the view counts will be visible to the author or everyone on the platform.
Twitter has had many people call for changes to how it identifies accounts and what can be done to call out which ones are more legit than others. As the company begins testing the new feature it would put a mark on accounts with a verified phone number.
Wong also noted another test feature showing view counts for tweets, which some users already have access to for their own tweets under the label of “analytics.” However, she said it’s unclear if this would be limited to the author or visible to everyone.
Linking an account to a number is one way to highlight that it was created with more effort than the simplest macro and could be used to filter out which tweets appear the most prominently or make it through the various 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 there isn’t a human behind each post.
Meanwhile, Twitter is battling a series of data breaches that appear to be rising. Most recently, a bad actor managed to leverage a security vulnerability and extract the data of millions of Twitter users, only to sell it on some other platform. The incident was reported by a security research firm and Twitter has recently confirmed it.
Twitter confirmed that the security flaw was exploited. The platform mentioned in a press release, “In July 2022, we learned through a press report that someone had potentially leveraged this and was offering to sell the information they had compiled.
After reviewing a sample of the available data for sale, we confirmed that a bad actor had taken advantage of the issue before it was addressed.”
In a previous report, Bleeping Computers mentioned that it has reached out to the attacker who intends to sell the data for the aforementioned amount. However, the attacker could release the information on the internet for free as well, which will put the security of millions of Twitter users into question.
Twitter said that it will inform the account owners that are confirmed to be affected by the security issue. However, it also said, “We aren’t able to confirm every account that was potentially impacted.”
