If you were a tad envious of people on Twitter who had that blue tick of verification on their profile, you shouldn't be anymore. Because the social networking website has opened up the verification form for everyone.
Starting today, anyone can request to be verified by filling up this form. Here are some of the pre-requisites for a Twitter verification.
- A verified phone number
- Your full name on the profile
- A confirmed email address
- A bio
- A profile photo
- A header photo
- A birthday (for accounts that are not company, brand, or organization accounts)
- A website
- Tweets set as public in Tweet privacy settings
After you have submitted the application, Twitter will verify all the details and if they find everything in order, an email will be sent to you informing you about the verification.
Up until now, Twitter verified only selected accounts, such as those belonging to political leaders, actors, stand-up comedians, journalists, and sports persons. Among millions of users, Twitter has only about 187,000 verified accounts.
The verified accounts have extra security filters as well as a timeline of all the interaction they have had with the other verified accounts. They can also filter out certain content with the help of Twitter's algorithm. One reason for opening up verification could be to curb online harassment.
"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," Tina Bhatnagar, Twitter's spokesperson, said in a statement.
"We hope opening up this application process results in more people finding great, high-quality accounts to follow, and for these creators and influencers to connect with a broader audience," she added.
Despite user growth being flat, the microblogging platform is trying to attract users by introducing new features and new measures for safety. Recently, they extended support for GIFs as big as 15 MB. The earlier limit was 5 MB.
Since Twitter converts GIFs into videos while uploading them to the platform, it is to be seen if these GIFs load properly. A persisting complaint among users has been about video on Twitter being slow. Some months ago, Twitter had also announced that they were going to ease the 140 character limit for tweets.