Twitter has faced harsh criticism from celebrities, including Kanye West, about impersonators creating unauthorized accounts on their behalf. Tony La Russa, the manager of the St. Louis Cardinals Major League Baseball franchise is suing Twitter claiming that someone is pretending to be him on the site.
Today, Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone responded to the lawsuit, adamantly stating that Twitter will not settle with La Russa, calling the lawsuit an “unnecessary waste of judicial resources bordering on frivolous.” Twitter, as it has done with other similar situations, suspended the account in question.
But in response to the problem of impersonators of brands and famous people, Twitter is giving us a sneak peak of an experimental feature they call “verified accounts.” Twitter says it will start rolling out the beta of this feature this summer for a small set of public officials, public agencies, famous artists, athletes, and other celebs who run the risk of impersonation. Businesses will not be included in the initial beta testing of the verification seal. As you can see from the image, the account holder’s page will have a “verified account” official seal in its profile box.
Impersonation is a problem on the web in general. Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler recently tried to sue a group of anonymous bloggers for pretending to be him, which proved to be futile. Facebook, like Twitter, is another platform where impersonators can create unauthorized pages on behalf of celebs and public figures.
Of course some Twitter impersonations can result in amicable situations. During the Ashton Kutcher vs. CNN race to a million followers, it was revealed that CNN didn’t own the CNNbrk Twitter account. CNN ended up taking control of the CNNbrk account, under the agreement that the original account holder, James Cox, would act as a “social media consultant” to the network. While Twitter’s verification seal is still in an experimental phase, it seems like a step in the right direction.
What if I had the name of one of those famous people? Could I be verified as Lance Armstrong or Michael Jordan? Or would they just verify them as the official celebrity?
Your real name is Michael Bolton, isn’t it?
Why don’t you just call yourself Mike? Hah Office Space.
I was about twelve years old and that no-talent ass clown became famous and started winning Grammys
No, he says in the blog post that “public officials, public agencies, famous artists, athletes, and other well known individuals at risk of impersonation” will be able to get verified accounts.
So someone with the same name would not fall into those categories.
But who gets to decide when an artist has crossed the famous threshold or not?
And even better… do they lose the verified account after they have “jumped the shark”? (ALA Dolph Lundgren: http://www.theo...tent/node/30688)
No, it says a _small set_ of ““public officials, public agencies, famous artists, athletes, and other well known individuals at risk of impersonation” are being invited to the _beta_ of this feature. Doesn’t mean “regular folk” won’t get to use it eventually.
Twitter is an unnecessary waste of technological, energy, and human resources. Hopefully Tony will take their cash. Then maybe it will be put towards something useful.
of course as long as your not posting pictures of the ‘Michael Jordan’ duh
Instead of suing Twitter, the obvious right way is to sue whoever was impersonating as the celebrity.
Often that information is not too hard to find out, as the scammers have links to their own websites on the twitter account, as a way to monetize the scam.
I hope they start to do this with websites, as there are a bunch of fairly popular twitter pages that simply scrape my sites RSS feed
And what if my family name is McDonald – I should be entitled to get the “verified” seal on a twitter profile called McDonalds if my tweeting is about my family shouldn’t I?
Elitist and deep pocket brand pigs suck the life force out of humanity
Twitter is such crap — no email verification at all, no CAPTCHA — their user base is Highly Suspicious.
I have like 12-16 accounts for various things. I have a friend who has over 100 accounts that he uses for marketing (Twitter Spam) and more.
Basically, Twitter is all Spammers, Marketers and their real numbers are a joke.
The page views are a joke too — people are nuts about twitter and hit REFRESH all day long.
1. Unverified number of “REAL” users — my guess is 1:20 to 1:50 ratio of real vs. fake people i.e. uniques
2. Refresh page views
3. Valuation MUCH LOWER THAN ALL THE HYPE
I’ve noticed that many of the accounts following the bigger brands and the random followers I pick up are shells.
Similarly, in the Race to a Million many of those accounts were spambots, recursive shells (large groups of fresh accounts that link back in on themselves), and blank accounts created to boost numbers.
As oftentimes happens in buy-outs the numbers are fraudulently inflated to the point of obscenity… but the company who winds up holding the bag is oftentimes too proud to admit that they were scammed.
An enterprising young coder who builds a tool to analyze the connections among twitter users could get a few minutes in the sun. The Harvard study just scratched the surface.
Johnny, your observation warrants a report of its own.
I wonder if Fox factored in the number of MySpace pages run by spammers, marketers, porn artists, and short-term experimenters before it overpaid for the site.
Yes, Fox paid less than a billion for MySpace, but even that has proven to be too much. They could have produced 4 or 5 major movies with the money.
I hope anyone considering an acquisition of Twitter will keep that in mind… Then again, anything that wastes Rupert Murdoch’s money is fine with me. Hey, Rupert, buy Twitter!
+1
No Crap. I may not be able to spell my name correctly in the English, but I can tell you we have the same problem in Iran. We are working on it though. Soon “the one” shall be born and he will know what to do about all these pretenders on the internet. Thank you. ~one world undivided~
I had read that LaRussa and Twitter settled the suit:
http://sports.e...tory?id=4235409
Is that false?
Stone says it is. I wonder where that report of settlement came from… a Tweet?
Funny how it takes those rich n powerful Celebs for Twitter to finally get their act together but what about us little people huh?
Good to hear Twitter listens to its users. I hope it doens’t just listen to its RICH users, because the sheep are saying – 140 characters is not engouh… maeaaa maeeaaa meaaaa:
http://www.yout...h?v=s7oqUfe5pug
I should hope they wuold do something. If only they could find a solution. hmmm. Maybe they could call Microsoft. BING.
I think this will be a good feature when it is rolled out!
It;s not about having the same name.. it’s about impersonation – and when that impersonation goes beyond a bit of fun. A Dj in the UK has several “twitter impersonators” where they use the same avatar and have for example a #1 where there should be an i in the name (and therefore looking like an almost identical account), but one decided to follow the people he was following (personal friends and such) and send inappropriate messages/tweets. I guess that’s where this verification will come in useful…
I do not think Launching Verified accounts is a great idea or should even be considered by the Court. It would just be like asking for a Passport to register a domain name using a celebrity name in order to make profit in future.
Will celebs have to pay for their ‘verified accounts’? I think they should?
Maybe everyone should be permitted to pay $20 per year to have their own ‘verified accounts’. It will allow those who are using twitter for legitimate purposes (anything but spammers), to verify that they are in control their accounts. I have a bunch of accounts set up for prospective business ideas (not spamming) and once I turn any of them into real businesses, I may be willing to pay a little for authenticity.
My one account, which I use daily is @socialcoop and I’m willing to pay $20 per year starting today if twitter will give me more value than a spammer. I’ve already paid for 3rd party twitter clients (Tweetie for both Mac desktop[$20] & iPhone[$3]), why not twitter itself?
Even if offered, I doubt the general public will pay for their “Verified User” status. But I do 100% agree that these celebrity/people that see negative effects from impersonators should pay for their “Verified” badge, and this includes all people/entities that fall in this category.
Anyone concerned with “brand management” should unequivocally be willing to to pay to ensure that brand in un-tainted. The cost of business.
That sounds like a protection racket to me. If Tony La Russa would rather fall asleep at the wheel than twitter, that is his choice and he should not have to pay to avoid being impersonated.
Because we’re all supposed to believe everything everyone represents of themselves on the Internet?
What kind of ludicrous logic is this?
Sure, it’s for the lawyers. But if you believe everything you see on the Internet, you’re as good as roadkill.
You should read mine… lmao. Anywho, they should do all kinds of neat stuff to clean up what had the potential to be a great networking tool. Spam control, Content control, Ease of use, The ability to take back crap you regret typing while you were drunk and so on. Technologies move forward everyday while twitter remains a good idea that stands still at the feet of it’s creator. Good job Jack or John or whoever you are.
so after canceling my twitter account yesterday within a minute of use, i re opened it again today out of curiosity? & within a few seconds i had
http://xurl.jp/kor
http://sa9.us/DaniellesCam
http://tinyurl.com/mx5ak3
all adult sites following me, they need capture or something to get rid of the adult sites. Any suggestions?
Why not accept them and then boast about how many followers you have? That appears to be what everyone else is doing.
Shouldn’t the celebs be suing the operators of the account, rather than Twitter itself?
There are little signs that Twitter will soon get too self important and explode and I’m only half joking
I’m glad twitter is doing this, but if you read their blog post on the subject they appear to be doing it reluctantly. This move is a no-brainer yet they would rather not do it.
I’ll never understand those guys…
Silner: WILL? Already has, methinks.
Interesting that they can launch ‘Verified Accounts’ for the celebs on Twitter but they can’t fix the problems that normal users are experiencing
Secret squirrel names doomed myspace and are why people saw twitter on Oprah, signed up and then never did anything.
If you can’t find anyone you really know only internet popular people show up and nobody mainstream cares about internet popular people.
I have a few Twitter accounts. @MarkCarras is the only one run by a human really though. @RockMyMonkey is just an RSS of articles posted. I would pay to have these accounts “verified” because it would put me above the spammers. I don’t think $20 is too much to ask. If you can’t afford that you don’t need the verified seal. I scrub toilets for a living and can afford it no problem.
We’ve been doing this for months now over at http://valebrity.com
Will be interesting to see how Twitter angle this – it’s a LOT of work. Very interesting reading some of the comments on here and very interested in seeing where this goes in the coming months.
That’s great to know, it’s about time that they did this. So how do you verify your account?