December 18, 2024

The story that is most often told about the origin of the verified badge begins with Tony La Russa, then manager of the St. Louis Cardinals. On June 3, 2009, news broke that La Russa was suing Twitter. Among other things, he claimed the company was guilty of trademark infringement, cybersquatting, and misappropriation of likeness and name. An impersonator had created a fake profile under La Russa’s name, using it to make light of drunken driving and the deaths of two Cardinals pitchers. The lawsuit claimed that this gave the impression that La Russa was the originator of the “derogatory and demeaning” tweets, damaging his trademark rights. Notably, it contended that Twitter itself had misappropriated and exploited his identity. 

That same month, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone published an article on the Twitter corporate blog headlined “Not Playing Ball.” Writing that La Russa’s lawsuit bordered on “frivolous,” Stone also took the opportunity to introduce a new product that he claimed had been in Beta testing before La Russa’s complaint: what the company called “verified accounts.” With an icon of a white checkmark against a blue background (the same blue as the famous Twitter logo) pinned to the top of a user’s profile page, the new feature would indicate real and verified accounts of “public officials, public agencies, famous artists, athletes, and other well-known individuals at risk of impersonation.” 

By July, La Russa’s team had quietly dropped the suit. (In the tech press, it was largely seen as being without merit — the fake La Russa was clearly a parody account; the profile bio even said it was fake.) But Twitter went forward with its plan for verified accounts. This is because the company actually wasn’t responding to La Russa and his lawsuit. Rather, Twitter was addressing the needs of the many celebrities who had begun using the site.

Cultivating Celebrity: “You Get a Badge! You Get a Badge! But Not Everybody Gets a Badge.”

According to individuals who worked for Twitter on the verified accounts product at the time, it was not La Russa’s lawsuit that brought on the need for the badge: it was Oprah Winfrey. When Winfrey joined Twitter on April 17, 2009 — in front of a live studio audience on her eponymous talk show, with Twitter co-founder Ev Wiliams at her side — both of them recognized  the moment’s significance in moving Twitter into the mainstream. After Williams reported that the company employed about 35 people, special correspondent Gayle King said matter-of-factly, “that’s going to change, Evan.” Even as one of the most famous and wealthy media figures moved onto the platform, Twitter’s potential was framed in democratic terms, with Winfrey repeating Williams’s description of Twitter’s value: “It democratizes media.” Within moments of sending her first tweet, an all caps message interpreted by the tech media at the time as “inept,” Winfrey had gained 100,000 followers. According to those who worked for Twitter during this period, this televised moment was one of the best marketing decisions Twitter made: “You can’t buy that in any capacity.”  

As Alice Marwick (now director of research at Data & Society) wrote in her 2013 book Status Update, this moment captured many of the value conflicts that were taking shape in Silicon Valley between 2006 and 2010, and arguably beyond it. The power of Web 2.0 lay in its “potential for liberation and participation, or its ability to empower regular people to garner as much attention as big companies and huge brands,” Marwick writes. But at the same time, the tech industry itself was developing within it a “strict social hierarchy,” with its own signifiers indicating “status” in internet communities, both online and off. The technology community did not necessarily need the “blue check” to signal their inclusion — other signifiers, like the “two-letter Twitter handle” was enough to communicate to others in the know that “its possessor was an early adopter.” But the value of these sites as commercial spaces, as participatory spaces (in the vision of Web 2.0), and spaces where the technology industry could boost its own status within social hierarchies, depended on Silicon Valley pursuing more established forms of status and influence: chief among them, celebrity. For the project of Web 2.0 to be a success toward the fulfillment of commercial, political, or legitimation goals,  celebrities — and eventually government officials and businesses — had to come online and mingle with the rest of us.

Researchers tracking this change at the time referred to it as Twitter’s “red carpet era,” a period that saw celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, Oprah Winfrey, and John Mayer joining the site to communicate with fans. Their popularity, measured in followers, grew quickly. On the same day that Oprah Winfrey joined the site — April 17, 2009 — Ashton Kutcher won a race against CNN to be the first account to collect one million followers.

But problems quickly arose with these high-status users. Celebrities like Kanye West began loudly criticizing the platform (famously, IN ALL CAPS) for their failures to remove impersonating accounts.  Other celebrity tweeters like Ashton Kutcher and Britney Spears had hundreds of Twitter impersonators. The practice of sending out a tweet using someone else’s name – typically a celebrity – became known as “twitterjacking.” This became enough of a problem that it gave rise to sites like Valebrity (a portmanteau of “valid” and “celebrity”), aimed at resolving questions of online identity.

A Badge on the Twitter Timeline of Fame: Connections Are Everything 

Twitter’s executive team recognized that the company needed a way to confirm the accounts of high-profile individuals. But with the launch of verified accounts, early acts of verification still required and relied on relationship-building — a process both ad-hoc and deeply resource-intensive. Early Twitter verifiers began fostering relationships with agents, handlers, or even the celebrities themselves, who would either write to ask for verification, or simply stop by the office. Though at some point the company hired a “VIP liaison” to do much of the brokering between celebrity handlers and the verification team, Twitter’s founders themselves  often served as key contacts for celebrities seeking the blue checkmark. Now stars in their own right — and the subjects of countless profiles from traditional and digital-native media — Twitter’s co-founders saw their cultural influence fortified as movie stars and rock stars, products of the old(er) media systems, asked them (sometimes through personal text messages) to endorse their significance within a new(er) media model. 

Of course, the presence of celebrities lent Twitter credibility as well, both fulfilling the more idealistic promises of Web 2.0 and helping Twitter itself reach wider audiences. But as Twitter sign-ups grew exponentially, it created new pressure to verify celebrities. With many people searching for famous names, it was easier for Twitter to simply place a blue checkmark next to its high-traffic celebrity users than to get rid of the many impersonating accounts, which numbered in the tens of millions.

Though still a niche social network, Twitter was already being used globally. This put the verification team in the powerful, and often awkward, position of deciding who was “notable” in areas of the world where they might not know as much about that specific celebrity culture (such as major soccer, or rather football players, who also had legions of impersonators). And as the symbol became more visible, other creative subcultures, such as the rap community, also sought out verification. This meant that platforms were no longer in the business of just verifying the identity of their high-profile users, but rather deciding who would be anointed as worthy of celebrity and status within this new media environment.

Once the blue check became more widely seen as a status symbol, more users began asking for it. Users perceived the blue check as having massive implications (whether real or not), in how Twitter surfaced an account in its recommendations. For individuals and organizations that had not been recognized by traditional media, this was a rare opportunity — and one to be seized.  

Generalizing the Infrastructure of Verification

Celebrities may have been the first group to whom the company doled out special accommodations, but they wouldn’t be the last. Over time, the infrastructure that had been put in place to verify the rich and famous (and convince them to use the platform) – eventually called the Global Media Partnerships team –  turned toward other organizations and individuals that were coming online. As government organizations and public officials began adopting Twitter and other social networking sites, in June 2010 Twitter announced that it was hiring its first government liaison, who would be in “direct dialogue with public officials who use our service.” But while verification was often part of that dialogue, it wasn’t necessarily the ultimate goal for either party. 

It wasn’t until much later, in 2016, that Twitter opened up verification more broadly. It did so through a web form that allowed activists, businesses, nonprofits, and those in media, entertainment, gaming, news, sports, and “other” to appeal for verified status. Essential to verification was not only confirming the identity of these users — which was done through institutional email addresses, Wikipedia pages, Google Trends, or public stock exchange documentation — but also that the account was deemed “in the public interest.” But in 2017, after it was discovered that Jason Kessler, one of the organizers behind the Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville, was verified, the program was again put on pause. It quickly became clear that Twitter’s verification system — initially built through relationships, and then supposedly bounded by the notoriously ambiguous “public interest” principle — was broken.

The Future of Verification

The infrastructure of verification that was developed during this period was also turned towards other goals. During the  Covid-19 pandemic, the blue check was used to mediate long-standing disputes between expert and non-expert knowledge. At other points, including during the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, the blue check was used as a way to address persistent racial and gender biases in media gatekeeping, a problem in traditional media that was reproduced — though certainly not to the same degree — in the social media era. 

The blue check has played an important role in reconciling our ideas of what platforms could and should be. It offered a way for us to think through early questions about how anonymity and identity functioned on online platforms; the role  of celebrity in online spaces; the growth of civic tech, government accounts, and the use of platforms in political campaigns; and what to do about mis/disinformation. To address these needs as they unfolded, platforms were busy building not only a technical infrastructure, but an infrastructure of people, to do the work of verification. That infrastructure, as Elon Musk (and now Facebook) surmised, has a value that can be monetized. 

This is part of an ongoing project on the history of the verified badge. Read part one and part two.

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.