CYBERSPACE — What sane person wants to tweet saucy offers of fame, fortune or flesh to a hot celebrity only to find out some spammer or other pathetic pretender is on the receiving end? Twitter.com feels the pain of its 140 character communicating members and has begun beta testing “Verified Account” badges for users who are so gosh darn popular that people pretend to be them. What must be presumed to be a prime example is provided in the “See what a verified account looks like!” link, which takes the curious to pop diva Pink’s Twitter home page. It is there that one can learn that the real Pink had a baby wombat “lookin’” at her “boobies.”
A white check mark inside a wavery blue badge with “Verified Account” written next to it assures the world that yup, as far as Twitter can tell, those boobies belonged to the real Pink.
What other celebrities have added the Verified Account badge to their Twitter home pages in order to reassure their nervous fans is unknown, since there doesn’t appear to yet be a way to search by verification status alone.
However, in case too much trust be placed in the badges, the Verified Account page reminds members that not having a badge doesn’t mean an account isn’t the real McCoy. The accounts of both Pope_Benedict and AKGovSarahPlain, for instance, are utterly shield-free, yet the distinctive writing styles and subject matters of their posts have an air of authenticity.
Likewise, the obviously satirical FauxSarahPalin account seems unlikely to be a code-filled message from the real Alaskan governor, although the months ago abandoned hockeymom64 manages to sound enough like the presumed inner workings of the four-or-five-time mother that it could be anyone’s guess.
According to CNET.com, not all fake accounts are so easy to identify, with those claiming to belong to the Dalai Lama and the Austin, TX police department resulting in complaints and confusion. Impersonators have presented themselves as comedian Stephen Colbert and media personality Ira Glass, and management for the St. Louis Cardinals has sued the startup due to a fake account attempting to pass itself off as belonging to the baseball team.
How many individuals might benefit from the verification service is unknown, but the Twitter.com/help/verified page explains that the company is currently offering it only to “well-known accounts that have had problems with impersonation or identity confusion.” Among the listed categories is “actors,” although porn actors are not specifically mentioned.
“We may verify more accounts in the future,” it goes on to say, “but because of the cost and time required we’re only testing this feature with a small set of folks for the time being. As the test progresses we may be able to expand this test to more accounts over the next several months.”
In the meantime, adult entertainers who have had to fight to prove their authenticity on Twitter might consider finding out what kind of “actors” can take advantage of the verification service.
