Despite publicly pausing verification, Twitter has verified 10,000+ accounts in recent months but withheld the privilege from anyone without backchannel access
letting people voluntarily tie their profiles to a verified identity could enable more trust and healthier conversations, two of the company's stated priorities @byardduncan : This is a very good scoop. The blue checkmark may not seem like a big deal, but in an age of aggressive disinformation, it's more important than ever to be systematic and transparent about who you stamp as “official.” This is, uh ... not systematic and transparent. http://twitter.com/... Karissa Bell / @karissabe : And yet any time a reporter has asked about how verification works since then the only answer we get is “verification is currently paused” Will Smidlein / @ws : Haven't you always needed a backchannel to get verified? I feel like they launched public verification, realized it was a horrible idea, but they can't come out and say it Erin Keane / @eekshecried : The backchannel's always been ridiculous. I had to apply twice for verification in 2016 and really throw a fit in my second app about abuse to get it, meanwhile most of my colleagues had been verified for years bc prior to my hiring someone had a friend of a friend on the inside. http://twitter.com/... Casey Newton / @caseynewton : If you tell everyone that you are “pausing” verification, and then verify 13,000 people in the past three months, then you are a liar http://twitter.com/... Martin Bryant / @martinsfp : It's bonkers that Twitter can't publicly make a decision on what verification is for and stick to it. This backdoor approach does nothing to stop the perception it's about privilege rather than identity. http://twitter.com/... Karissa Bell / @karissabe : Twitter says verification is “paused” but in reality the only thing that's changed is there is no publicly accessible way to request verification, which means some of the people who need verification most can't get it https://mashable.com/... Karissa Bell / @karissabe : Twitter says it is still verifying “select” accounts. According to our analysis the company has verified more than 13,000 in the last 4.5 months (including Jack Dorsey's parents) http://mashable.com/... Karissa Bell / @karissabe : New fro me: Twitter verification has been “paused” for 17 months, but the company is still verifying thousands of accounts http://mashable.com/... Kerry Flynn / @kerrymflynn : Thank you, @karissabe. It's such BS that @jack made such a big deal about pausing it to reevaluate how the process, but continues to verify celebs + whoever else they internally approve http://mashable.com/...I'll continue to desperately tweet about it http://twitter.com/... Matt Navarra / @mattnavarra : Twitter's verification process is still a total mess http://mashable.com/... Thanks: @karissabe
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2019 Mashable scoop caught Twitter running a shadow verification program: while publicly insisting verification was paused after the backlash over verifying Jason Kessler, the company stamped 10,000+ accounts — but only ones with insider connections. The finding confirmed what the platform's own reporters kept hitting: ask how verification works and the answer was silence.
That opacity is the through-line of everything since. Two months later The Atlantic argued the arbitrary process had spawned a whole verification-scam economy. By 2023 Twitter wound down the legacy program entirely — the June 2009-era checkmark retired on April 1 — replacing gatekeeping-by-backchannel with a subscription, then force-assigning Blue badges to critics like @dril and Kara Swisher who never asked for them.
First-order effects
- Users without personal contacts inside Twitter were locked out of verification entirely during the supposed pause, making the blue checkmark an insider privilege rather than an identity signal.
- Reporters covering the platform had no way to audit the program — the company's only public answer to how verification worked was evasion, leaving the 10,000+ grants unexplained.
Second-order effects
- The opaque, arbitrary process created a market for verification scams, as The Atlantic documented, because buyers couldn't tell a legitimate badge from a bought one.
- When the backchannel gave way to Twitter Blue, the same distrust carried over: major newsrooms including the NYT, LAT, and WaPo refused to pay or reimburse for badges, and Twitter responded by restoring checkmarks to 1M+ follower accounts whether or not they subscribed.
Third-order effects
- Verification has inverted from an identity-attestation system into a revenue line, which structurally destroys the badge's value as a trust marker — the exact outcome the 2019 reporting foreshadowed.
- If platforms keep treating verification as either patronage or product rather than infrastructure, the durable fix is a rebuilt, transparent system external to any single company's discretion.
The trend: Social media verification is decoupling from identity and reattaching to payment and influence, eroding the checkmark's function as a disinformation defense.