Twitter is letting its users in India mark their accounts as having a confirmed phone number. Users who activate this setting will have a new "verified phone number" mark shown on their profile, but their actual number won't be displayed. This mark is not the same as the blue checkmark, Twitter clarified on its help page. https://twitter.com/aroondeep/status/1609504220897742849?s=46&t=QQsJjaC20Y-U7O8e0brIig It's not clear when Twitter launched this feature, but journalist Aroon Deep tweeted about it on December 31. Why is Twitter doing this? Twitter is enabling this feature in India presumably to comply with the IT Rules, 2021, which require significant social media intermediaries like Twitter to allow users in India to voluntarily verify their accounts "by using any appropriate mechanism, including the active Indian mobile number of such users". Further, the Rules require verified users to be provided with a “demonstrable and visible mark of verification” that is visible to all users of the service. Indian microblogging platform, Koo, for example, allows voluntary verification using Aadhaar. How effective is this feature in addressing spam? The idea behind the verification provision in the IT Rules is to allow users to verify whether an account belongs to an actual person or whether it's spam/run by a bot. "We believe that by self-verifying themselves, users can help to curb the spread of unwarranted content proliferated under the veil of anonymity,” Koo explained when it launched its verification feature. But it's not clear how exactly this will address the spam issue unless Twitter includes the verification metric in some…
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Twitter is letting Indian users show a verified phone number mark on their profiles
Users who activate this setting will have a new “verified phone number” mark shown on their profile but how will this feature help address spam?
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