I'm already experiencing Verification blindness

If everyone's famous...

Banner blindness is a phenomenon where web users ignore “banner-like” content, because of the frequency of banner advertising.

Twitter is inciting similar behaviour in users with the new free-for-all Verification system. Where the criteria for Verification used to require users to be “active, notable, and authentic”, now anyone can obtain it.

Verification can serve a variety of purposes, but the primary use case I encountered was identifying notable people within Twitter replies. If “Casey Neistat” is responding to “Mr Beast” (two famous online creators), I can locate those tweets quickly.

In political Twitter, it was less useful. For instance, whenever Donald Trump would tweet, you’d get instantaneous responses from an army of checkmarked sycophants begging for attention¹. Termed by ABC as “Trump responders”², accounts such as Eugene Gu would race to reply first, utilizing their checkmark as a faux sign of authenticity.

Since the introduction of Twitter Blue Verification, the uselessness has spread across the platform. Non-notable people getting Verification already reduces the ability to distinguish people, but trolls getting access makes it actively harmful.

Twitter user @Asensii20 was what inspired this post (I want to stress here - I am using this user as an example, please don’t harass this person).

Despite the Twitter description, make no mistake: this is a troll hiding behind the veneer of parody.

One of his many pastimes is posting negative responses whenever a Minecraft YouTuber tweets.

Most of these are responses to someone being wished a “Happy Birthday”.

This is garbage content that serves little purpose to me. Without the checkmark, they would have disappeared into the noise. Any famous person receives waves of negativity, such that you learn to ignore it. The checkmark brings it back into your attention. To add to the problem, Verified tweets appear to be boosted to the top of replies³, meaning they’re more prominently placed.

The only response from my perspective is to discard the blue checkmark as having any meaning. It no longer signifies a user that has any notable trait. The meaning will be diluted to the point where Twitter users discard it entirely.

1. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/charliewarzel/trollpotusgrowthhack

2. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-17/donald-trump-responders-on-twitter-first-tweet-replies/10713688

3. Can’t see an official source confirmed or denying this behaviour, pure observation. EDIT: Confirmed by Elon

Elon Musk @elonmusk

@foxmediallc @paulg Twitter Verified tweets are more likely to be recommended to others, as they are less likely to be bots or troll farms