Twitter Blue Badges: India new verification process from January 20

New Delhi: Twitter India has announced that its new verification policy will be implemented from January 20 and the company will begin automatically removing the verified badge from inactive and incomplete accounts. Under the new policy, Twitter may also remove verification from accounts that are found to be in severe or repeated violation of its rules.

The  Microblogging site had earlier this month announced that it will relaunch the verification, including a new public application process, in early 2021.

Twitter had paused its public verification process or Blue Badge three years ago and is now asking the public to share feedback on a draft of its new verification policy.

"Calling for public feedback has become an important part of our policy development process because we want to ensure that, as an open service, our rules reflect the voices of the people who use Twitter," the company had said in a statement.

The public feedback period started on November 24 and continued until December 8. Twitter aims to introduce the final policy on December 17. In the two weeks during our public feedback period, Twitter received more than 22,000 survey responses.

Twitter said it is not planning to automatically remove the verified badge from inactive accounts of people who are no longer living, and are working on building a way to memorialize these accounts in 2021. Before it reopens the verification process that saw its share of controversies in the past couple of years, the micro-blogging platform has asked the public to share feedback on a draft of its new verification policy.

The six types of accounts that Twitter has identified to start are:

1. Government
    
2. Companies, Brands and Non- Profit Organizations
    
3. News
    
4. Entertainment
    
5. Sports
    
6. Activists, Organizers, and Other Influential Individuals

Twitter said that it will automatically remove verification from an account if they have been inactive or if the profile is incomplete.

"We’ve also added proposed criteria to automatically remove verification from an account if, for example, it's inactive or if the profile is incomplete, as well as grounds to deny or remove verification from certain qualified accounts that are found to be in repeated violation of the Twitter Rules. We recognize that there are many verified accounts on Twitter who should not be. We plan to start by automatically removing badges from accounts that are inactive or have incomplete profiles to help streamline our work and to expand this to include additional types of accounts over the course of 2021," Twitter said.

With IANS Inputs