Account Verification on Social Media: User Perceptions and Paid Enrollment

TL;DR

This study examines user perceptions of social media verification, especially on Twitter, revealing widespread misunderstandings and analyzing how verification status changes post-policy shift, with implications for platform transparency and credibility.

Contribution

The paper combines a user survey and a large-scale account analysis to reveal misconceptions about verification and how verification status shifts following platform policy changes.

Findings

Over 80% misunderstand new verification indicators

Older users and those with lower digital literacy are more prone to misunderstandings

Accounts with political or cryptocurrency content gained verification disproportionately after changes

Abstract

We investigate how users perceive social media account verification, how those perceptions compare to platform practices, and what happens when a gap emerges. We use recent changes in Twitter's verification process as a natural experiment, where the meaning and types of verification indicators rapidly and significantly shift. The project consists of two components: a user survey and a measurement of verified Twitter accounts. In the survey study, we ask a demographically representative sample of U.S. respondents (n = 299) about social media account verification requirements both in general and for particular platforms. We also ask about experiences with online information sources and digital literacy. More than half of respondents misunderstand Twitter's criteria for blue check account verification, and over 80% of respondents misunderstand Twitter's new gold and gray check verification indicators. Our analysis of survey responses suggests that people who are older or have lower digital literacy may be modestly more likely to misunderstand Twitter verification. In the measurement study, we randomly sample 15 million English language tweets from October 2022. We obtain account verification status for the associated accounts in November 2022, just before Twitter's verification changes, and we collect verification status again in January 2022. The resulting longitudinal dataset of 2.85 million accounts enables us to characterize the accounts that gained and lost verification following Twitter's changes. We find that accounts posting conservative political content, exhibiting positive views about Elon Musk, and promoting cryptocurrencies disproportionately obtain blue check verification after Twitter's changes. We close by offering recommendations for improving account verification indicators and processes.