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Comment by dominotw | Hacker News Reader

I am assuming twitter would start suppressing non-verifed accounts in replies/searches ect.

Wouldn't this make arab spring style twitter revolutions impossible. How do you criticize your govt in countries where you could go to jail for what you say online. Just wondering if this has something to do with their notorious saudi investor.

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Based on some of the quotes from Twitter, I don't think they will be suppressing non-verified users. It seems this is more so that people who would be deserving of verification based on the criteria that previously existed don't need to wait until Twitter notices them to get it.

For example:

> an account may be verified if it is determined to be of public interest.

> We want to make it even easier for people to find creators and influencers on Twitter so it makes sense for us to let people apply for verification

Yeah, I don't know why everyone thinks this means they quality. Just because anyone can apply doesn't mean everyone will get it. It's still very much the same as before. I think the bigger draw will be towards brands. Question is, how big of a following do you need?

> Question is, how big of a following do you need?

Looking around I find that apart from journalists (who can get verified with just a few hundred followers) few "real" people with less than 20,000 followers seem to be verified.

Even if you are "important" (eg a politician, actor, businessman) then it seems to be rare the be verified at that level.

Above 100,000 followers it seems very rare not to have the blue tick. All of the top 100 are verified. I did find https://twitter.com/joshingstern who has over a million followers and is unverified plus the odd person over 100,000

So random guess I'd say 20,000 minimum to bother applying and 100,000 to guarantee being accepted.

I don't know if its changed, but large accounts can lose their check if they change their name. Someone I follow had that happen a while back and they were quite annoyed by it since I guess there was no warning?

Yeah; $10 says there's a preference coming "Only show notifications from verified accounts" or "Only allow verified accounts to follow" etc etc.

Notification filters are already a feature of verified accounts.

http://sproutsocial.com/insights/verified-accounts-using-twi...

I'll take that bet timeboxed to the end of 2016.

> I am assuming twitter would start suppressing non-verifed accounts in replies/searches ect.

How would that benefit them?

It would also make abuse much harder. There are no easy solutions.

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