July 31, 2024

Read part one: “Doing research on the internet often means studying a moving target.”

Social media platforms have always served as mediators between people’s online identities. This has been noted by countless scholars of early social media (including Zizi Papacharissi, Nicole Ellison, danah boyd, and Alice Marwick) who study identity and self-presentation online. Allison Hearn’s work on the verified badge has explored this symbol’s relationship to self-presentation and identity management, looking specifically at the role that platforms like Twitter have come to play within the “identity management and verification market.” Emily van der Nagel has explored this dimension of verification as identification, or rather the “confirmation that an account is linked to a particular person.” Work in this area often centers on the “real name policies” adopted by social media companies during the early-to-mid period of Web 2.0, and the issues these policies posed for privacy and freedom of expression. Perhaps the most famous of these conflicts — known as the “nymwars” — emerged from a battle between proponents of online pseudonymity and Google’s brief attempt at a social media network, Google+, which required that users provide their “real names.” (As danah boyd argued at the time, the ire was overly focused on Google, when Facebook also had a damaging real names policy.)

But to understand the verified badge — the blue check as it emerged as a symbol not only of how platforms mediate identity, but also of power and status, and where those concepts meet — we need to go back to a conflict just slightly earlier in the history of social media: the battle between Friendsters and Fakesters.

In the summer of 2003, Silicon Valley was very excited about a new startup called Friendster.com. Founded by a former Netscape programmer named Jonathan Abrams, Friendster aimed to compete with existing dating sites like JDate and Match.com. Abrams wanted a way to keep users more honest, particularly about their appearance. His idea, which allowed users to define their identity through a profile and connect their online selves to their actual real life friends, would, in his view, create a publicly articulated network that would hold users accountable to their offline selves. This social pressure would lead, somehow, to honesty — or at the very least, he figured, “people will put a more accurate picture of themselves on Friendster because you know your friends will see it.” As part of that, the site required the use of real names.

Friendster was not the first social media site or virtual community to encourage real names and real profiles. When the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (The WELL), an online virtual community, was launched in 1985, founders Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant insisted on an important social rule built into their software: “Nobody is anonymous.” Though it was possible to use pseudonyms to create alternate identities, those pseudonyms were always linked “in every posting to the real userid.” This aligned with one of the founding principles of The WELL: “you own your own words,” referred to as YOYOW. It was intended both as a statement of accountability (“responsibility for your actions”) and as one of ownership (the WELL insisted on no copyright claims for the words of others). 

But by the late-1990s, real name policies were certainly not the norm online. Usenet, founded by Tom Truscott and James Ellis in 1979 and considered a precursor to what would become internet forums, could be joined by anyone with an email address. Though Nancy Baym argued in 1995 that the “From” line in a message worked as a “salient contextualization cue” that also “helps make the sender accountable for behavior,” ostensibly any user could use any email to make an account. That provided users with relative anonymity (even if, as Baym notes in her article, the identities of particularly frequent posters remained relatively stable). In this era people created elaborate identities in multiuser dungeons, email was relatively anonymous, LiveJournal was pseudonymous, and standalone Geocities web pages rarely featured the creators’ names. But other social networking sites at the time — such as SixDegrees.com (founded in 1997) and LinkedIn — did feature real names.

Friendster relied on friends inviting friends, and that network, which began to include friends of friends of friends of friends, quickly became unwieldy. This issue of scale became a concern for both the technology underlying it (users cited “habitual server lag problems”) and the social structures of rules and norms built into it (Friendster had a reputation for “heavy-handed moral policies and unilateral decisions” made on behalf of its users). At the social level, Friendster’s inability to adapt to the norms developing over its platform, particularly the popularity of a new type of parody/satire account called Fakesters, foretold its eventual demise.

The term “Fakester” was coined by Friendster itself to refer to “profiles created by imposters or dedicated to someone else other than the author, such as a pet or a celebrity.” By mid-2003, Friendster officially had a Fakester problem. This was a particular problem for the site’s founder, Jonathan Abrams: “Fake profiles really defeats the whole point of Friendster,” he said in a 2003 interview with Salon.com. “Some people find it amusing,” he conceded, “but some people find it annoying.” 

But Friendster users felt differently. People created Fakesters for famous people both real (Angelina Jolie), and fictional (Homer Simpson). Accounts were made for places, but not necessarily by official representatives of those places (Brown University and New Jersey), as well as for broad identity markers (Black Lesbians and FemSex). Users pushed things even further, making accounts for concepts. “Pure Evil” could be friends with “War,” who (which) could be friends with “The World Trade Center” (though it’s perhaps unlikely that account would be Friendsters with the account “Defying the Patriot Act”).

Other fake accounts emerged that were meant to look like real accounts but were not. In a taxonomy that she quickly wrote down for preservation on her blog, danah boyd separated these Friendster/Fakesters into two different types: (1) play characters, meant for fun and entertainment; and (2) passable characters, which were meant to appear real on the system. The latter included accounts made by Friendster users for unwilling real-life friends, as well as those used as “bait” (accounts made by men, presumably, pretending to be women), and clones or spite-based fraudsters (like Jonathan Abrams parodies).

Initially, leaders at Friendster said accounts would be able to remain on the site as long as there were no complaints made (like now, users could “flag” someone’s profile for removal). But Abrams quickly pushed back. When asked about the policy in an interview with SF Weekly in August 2003 (just one month after Friendster said some Fakester accounts could stay), Abrams shook his head emphatically and said, “No. They’re all going. All of them.” Abrams purged the accounts. Unsurprisingly, the rift between how the CEO wanted the site to be used, and how users wanted to use the site, led to growing tension.  

But getting rid of Fakesters would be a matter of playing “whack-a-mole.” As soon as Friendster deleted Fakester accounts, new ones would emerge or old ones would reappear on the site as duplicates. A “Fakester Manifesto” began circulating under the name “Roy Batty,” wherein the Fakesters asserted their right to exist in these new online spaces. “Identity,” as the authors noted, is always “provisional,” both online and off: “Who we are is whom we choose to be at any given moment, depending on personality, whim, temperament, or subjective need.” The manifesto extended these notions of identity to copyright. Users saw the struggle over Fakesters as ultimately about forms of authority over images and likeness. The authors of the manifesto noted that while Abrams was wary of Fakesters stealing copyrighted material by using the likeness of characters like Homer Simpson, he seemed unable or unwilling to examine how his own site was asserting ownership over the likeness and identities of its users.

Only in 2004, long after many of Friendster’s users had parted ways with the site and headed to the greener (and less manicured) pastures of Myspace, did the platform demonstrate just what terms could justify the existence of fakesters: commercial backing. In a collaboration with DreamWorks to promote their new film Anchorman, Friendster users were able to friend profiles for the characters Ron Burgundy, Veronica Corningstone, Brian Fantana, Brick Tamland, and Champ Kind. Banner ads promoting the film all-but-confirmed the partnership between Friendster and the studio giant. Suddenly “Fakesters” were sanctioned by the site itself — an early indication of the types of stratification that would accompany online content policies. But that this special case was made for Dreamworks — a large media company that had the power to sanction what Friendster, the platform, did, particularly in the use of copyrighted characters — foretold the types of symbolic reciprocity between old and new institutions that, over the next two decades, would define what would become the the verified badge. As platforms began to worry less about deciding what or who was fake, and focused rather on deciding what or who was real, this link between old and new was forged in the shape of a blue checkmark. 

In the next installment of A Working History of the Verified Internet, we examine what happened as more traditional celebrities and media companies merged onto social media platforms. During this period, referred to as “the celebrity wars” or the “red carpet era,” the verified badge began to take on a new meaning, merging desires to represent “real” identities with recognition of status and notability. 

This is an ongoing history of the verified badge. If you are/were a platform employee working on verification policies at any of the major platforms between 2005-2022, and would be willing to be interviewed for this project, please contact [email protected]. All identifying information will be removed from interviews. 

This post is an output from a project funded by the Internet Society Foundation.