Twitter is reportedly testing a new feature that will allow people to identify the legitimacy of an account. Twitter engineer Jane Manchun Wong announced that her team is developing labels on profiles that indicate the account’s phone number has been verified.
Linking accounts by phone number is one way to filter out which tweets are more trustworthy. This follows a problem with the number of bot accounts on Twitter, which was disputed by former prospective buyer, Elon Musk.
Based on Wong’s post, the label will be on the profile, below the account bio. Reporting from The Verge (20/8), Twitter allows users to have the same phone number to be connected to 10 different accounts.
Twitter is working on verified… phone number label on profile pic.twitter.com/H4gJGaNHQT
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) August 19, 2022
Phone number verification is nothing new to Twitter. Blue tick accounts have long been required to have a verified phone number or email address. CEO Jack Dorsey previously also talked about a verification plan for everyone, to verify facts about themselves.
However, encouraging people to link a phone number to an account and display a status label, can create data security issues. This can provoke greater data theft practices.
As is known on August 5, Twitter announced details of the incident attackers found 5.4 million account names associated with phone numbers and email addresses. Additionally, the 2020 hack allowed attackers to tweet from the accounts of Jack Dorsey and Joe Biden about Bitcoin.
Twitter confirms vulnerability exposed data that affected millions of accounts
