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Comment by tablespoon | Hacker News Reader

> It must match the government-issued ID / business documents / etc. that were used to verify in the first place. If you want to change it, send updated verification documents.

That seems like a bad requirement, because I'd imagine a lot of these legitimately-verified accounts go by professional names (e.g. actors, authors with a pen name, etc.) not legal names.

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A sane policy would be that there's a process for verified accounts to change their name, and that process is that some human at Twitter sees the account's current name and new name and rejects changes that aren't obviously still "the same person." A policy like this could prevent these kind of "pretend to be Vitalik or Elon or whoever" schemes without actually having to review the verification itself.

So you can still allow hashtags and emoji and so on being stuck onto names, still allow "spooky" Halloween names, but preserve some kind of value from the verified checkmark.

I don't know how many verified users there are but this doesn't seem like it would necessarily be onerous. Of course, it's still more onerous than just doing nothing about it is.

You can be flexible in the initial validation - it's reasonable to allow William Jefferson Clinton to go by Bill Clinton if he wants to.

And it's reasonable to allow name changes - it's not unusual for people to get married, or for companies to rebrand.

But why let people change names without repeating the validation process? It's not like people are getting married several times a year or anything like that.

I think business documentation in these cases is obvious choice. So you present good enough claim to that name or what ever and you get verification. This however means it is not personal account, but tied to that name or entity. Whoever owns it.

So government ID + some reputable source (news article, etc.) that links your real name to your professional name, and then it can’t change.

There is Facebook for that, used by no one.

Facebook policy is to require a real name for every user. I'm struggling to see how that's relevant here.

If you want to tweet under an anonymous pseudonym -- great! We are talking about an optional verification feature for a subset of users who are at risk of impersonation. These people choose to participate in this program because they want their identity to be clear and legitimate.

Maybe I've seen less Twitter users that satisfy (famous && real name && at risk) than normally observed...

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