Twitter tests a special tag to highlight phone number-verified accounts

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Many people have called for changes to how it identifies accounts and what can be done to call out which accounts are legit. An engineer named Jane Manchun Wong has found a way to mark accounts with verified phone numbers. Some users already have access to for their own tweets under the label of "analytics." She said it was not clear if this would be visible to everyone.

One way to show that an account was created with more effort than a simple macro is by linking it to a number. People can have the same phone number for up to ten different accounts and developers can label automated accounts to let people know there isn't a human behind each post.

A verified phone number or email address is required to open a verified blue check account. The idea of having people verify facts about themselves was mentioned by Jack Dorsey when he was the CEO.

Securing that data becomes an issue if you encourage users to link phone numbers to their accounts. An attacker was able to discover over five million account names associated with phone and email addresses. By the company's own account, the privacy flaw was introduced in a June 2021.

The attackers were able to use the internal tools of the company to hack into Jack and Joe's accounts. A former employee was convicted of espionage after he used his position to access the email addresses, phone numbers, and birthdates of users who were critical of him.

In May, the social network agreed to a $150 million settlement for improper use of phone numbers and email addresses in its advertising.

There is a lot of pressure to make sure information posted on social media comes from real people or at least someone who is in the country they claim. It is not known if or when the phone number tag will be rolled out widely on the social networking site.