Features

Verified

Twitter’s verification badge was created as a way to help people find more reliable voices to follow. But over the years, the programme has become so entangled in controversy, it’s had to be put on ice.

03 September 2020

Twitter launched the beta version of its ‘verified accounts’ service during the swine flu outbreak in 2009 as a way to authenticate high-profile, public- interest accounts.

Company CEO Jack Dorsey told a congressional hearing into Twitter’s transparency and accountability in September 2018: “It started as a way to verify that the CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) account was the actual CDC account.”

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