Twitter Fined Under Digital Services Act

I don't understand how anyone can use X. Like, literally. The site has been more broken than ever since Musk took over. I don't know why people still post there because I can't read it. I'm not using his spyware app, and as I said the website is so broken I can't even view a post without the browser nearly crashing from all the injected content and popups trying to force me to login and god knows what else.

@bart I just use the web site (with login), and it works fine. No pop-ups. No crashes. It works at least as well as it ever did.

Probably because I’m on mobile and don’t want to log in. Which used to work perfectly fine.

Trying to follow a link in something like News Explorer is pretty painful.

@bart I do it like a caveman. I use a nitter instance that's still online. I've bookmarked specific people. Then I open all tabs and enjoy. No account, no client, no problem!

xcancelled.com

From the commissions press release:
„On X, anyone can pay to obtain the ‘verified' status without the company meaningfully verifying who is behind the account, making it difficult for users to judge the authenticity of accounts and content they engage with. […] While the DSA does not mandate user verification, it clearly prohibits online platforms from falsely claiming that users have been verified, when no such verification took place.“

As I understand, they try to maintain the meaning of the „blue checkmark“for the user – should suit you well, to adhere to the meaning of a symbol/word/acronym ;-)

I'm grateful to Musk for making the non registered user experience of X so horrible that I no longer try to view linked xeets.

It's completely gone from my life. I sometimes see posted screenshots of what people payy over there and I fear for humanity.

> I just use the web site (with login), and it works fine

I only open Twitter when I click on a link to it. When I'm not logged in, it shows the tweet about half the time. About 25% of the time it shows a request to create an account, and about 25% of the time, the blue spinner loading the tweet keeps spinning, and nothing happens (although most recently, I think this happens less often than it used to).

As for the actual point, I think "verified" and the blue checkmark have a pretty well-established meaning across different services: They mean "this person is who they pretend to be." That's what it means on Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok. That's the whole reason it is desirable in the first place.

I don't quite understand whether Twitter's blue checkmark still actually means that. If it does, then there's no problem with also associating a cost with it, imo. If it does not, then it's misleading.

Reading the linked page, the only points relating to actual verification are:

* Non-Deceptive:
* Your account must have no recent changes to your profile photo, display name, or username (@handle)
* Your account must have no signs of being misleading or deceptive
* Your account must have no signs of engaging in platform manipulation and spam

The first point is irrelevant; I can be a long-term liar. The latter two points are unclear to me, because Twitter doesn't say what they do to verify these "signs."

Seconding xcancel.com. I would never be able to view any content on x / twitter without it.

I pretty much never, ever view instagram or Facebook content because it won't show you *anything* without being logged in. And to hell with logging into any site owned by Meta. (Or Google for that matter.)

@Christian I think what Twitter is claiming is that the account is verified to be a real person (not a bot) but not necessarily a specific person (like before). As @Plume says, it’s not really clear what the criteria are, but I guess if it were that would just make the system easier to game. Personally, I don’t think the extra government ID level of verification is that useful. They already have a rule that (regardless of verification) you can’t impersonate a person or organization. It seems like the blue-check accounts that are not who they claim to be do get taken down, but maybe the EU has examples to the contrary? I haven’t seen where they actually present their evidence.

"It seems like the blue-check accounts that are not who they claim to be do get taken down, but maybe the EU has examples to the contrary?"

I'm not sure this specific question makes sense. When accounts are exposed, I would expect Twitter to react. The question is whether they're doing enough to prevent verified but misleading accounts in the first place, not whether they react when such accounts are exposed.

The recent revelation that many verified accounts claiming to be Americans were not Americans, and that Twitter had all the data to know this but kept them verified anyway, makes me think the EU has an excellent point. Also, in a cursory check, all the accounts caught by the location feature that I looked up are still up and still have the blue checkmark, so it doesn't even seem to be the case that Twitter reacts when accounts are exposed.

"If you click on a blue checkmark, it shows a popover stating, “This account is verified. Learn more."

At this point, I'm convinced the blue checkmark doesn't mean "verified" at all; it means "paying subscriber." So even the popover is false.

Twitter profiles with the check mark are shown as Verified, but it really just means it's a paying user who has cleared a few low hurdles. Details are here:

https://help.x.com/en/managing-your-account/about-x-verified-accounts

For comparison, here's the prior Verified system:

https://help.x.com/en/managing-your-account/legacy-verification-policy

@Plume Who gets to define what “verified” should mean? There’s a long Internet history of accounts being considered “verified” once they were associated with a payment method or if you supplied a phone number or e-mail address and then responded to an automated ping to prove that you controlled it.

"Who gets to define what “verified” should mean?"

1. The word's definition defines what the word means

2. Every other online service creates a reasonable expectation for what it means

I genuinely appreciate your insights, Michael, and I'm sure you're arguing in good faith, but I'm having trouble with what you're saying here. Verified literally means "proved to be true". If it's next to a Twitter account's name, it means that I can trust this name. I don't really understand how you can argue that it doesn't mean that.

Clinton had a better point when he asked for the definition of "is" than Twitter does if they genuinely claim that "a verified account" means "a paid account." That's a bit like buying a car that's advertised to have four wheels, and then you get a car without wheels and the salesperson says "well, it has a steering wheel and three knobs on the dashboard that turn, so it really depends on your definition of what a wheel is." Yeah, sure, those could be called wheels, but we both know that you fucked me over.

@Plume To be clear, I think it’s dumb that Twitter is basically the company that introduced the sort of ID verification you’re talking about, others followed, but now they’re using the same word to mean something different (and kind of half phasing out the word). It’s inviting this sort of controversy. They should probably just call it Premium or whatever. And maybe they don’t do a good job of the sort of behavior verification they claim to do. I don’t know what’s really going on with those foreign-IP accounts. There was apparently a longstanding internal debate about the location data because many felt it was unreliable before Musk overruled them. All the accounts I saw mentioned in news reports are either removed or now claim to be fans or expats. I’m not aware of any that claim to be a specific person but are not that person, which is what we were initially talking about.

As to your more general point, I just disagree. I don’t think verification has that sort of intrinsic meaning. Like I said, there’s a long history of it meaning other things. And it’s hard to argue that the intent is to deceive when the popover links to the definition being used.

"All the accounts I saw mentioned in news reports are either removed or now claim to be fans or expats"

Here's a random Fox News article, the first search result on this topic I found just now.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/xs-new-location-feature-exposes-apparent-fraudster-accounts-posing-americans-gaza-journalists

It mentions the following accounts:

1776General_ - Still verified, now lists location US
AbujomaaGaza - No longer verified, now lists location Gaza
QudsNen - Still verified, now lists location Palestine
Timesofgaza - Still verified, now lists location Palestine

Of the four accounts Fox brings up as not being authentic, three are still verified, and they've now all learned to VPN into the "correct" location.

(Related to "I just use the web site, and it works fine": I wish I could actually look at what AbujomaaGaza is posting, but Twitter only shows me "Something went wrong. Try reloading." instead of showing any of their tweets.)

"I don’t think verification has that sort of intrinsic meaning"

I think you're in the minority, which matters. From the government's perspective, the standard is how the average person would interpret the symbol.

1. The word "verified" literally means "proved to be true."
2. The symbol is shown next to the user's name
3. When you click on it, it says "This account is verified", which is an even broader claim
4. Twitter used to properly verify accounts in the past, show the same symbol, and use the same wording
5. Every similar social network with a similar feature properly verifies accounts

This is deceptive. It just is. It doesn't matter if it is intended to be deceptive or not. It doesn't matter if you are personally deceived by it, because I very much doubt that you represent the average Twitter user.

This is the exact kind of corporate behavior that governments are supposed to prevent.

@Plume The first one that you mentioned claims to be an expat, like I said. This was the first article that came up for me. The two MAGA-type accounts were suspended. The fan accounts were clearly labelled as such. One lists the location as “Earth.” There’s some dispute over the Gaza account. The article is skeptical that the location-revealing feature is accurate. You seem to agree given your remark about VPNs. If your issue is that the IP-based location and self-reported location match, but you think they’re fake, that just reduces to your other complaint that you don’t like the definition of verification being used. (And it’s unclear how government ID–based verification would prove what the user’s current location is, anyway.)

If governments want to regulate how a word is used in their country (e.g. “organic” and “car” vs. “truck”), they should pass a law with a definition. I don’t think it should be up to some bureaucrat’s idea of what the average person would think.

"The fan accounts were clearly labelled as such"

Nobody claims that they weren't fan accounts. The accounts were lying about who they were, not necessarily what they were. The Ivanka fan account posted inflammatory US political content as if they were an American, so the fact that they were verified would lead me to believe that an American ran the account.

"The article is skeptical that the location-revealing feature is accurate. You seem to agree given your remark about VPNs"

I do not agree. Two points:

First, IP geolocation is bad at detecting which specific city a connection is from, but it's reliable at detecting which country a connection is from.

Second, I'm just going to put it out there that actual Americans posting on Twitter aren't going to VPN into Africa first.

They are lying about the location *now* that they know it's public, but there was no reason to lie about it beforehand, and there was never any reason for Americans posting to US Twitter accounts to lie about their location.

The location on a Twitter account has become unreliable only now that it is visible.

I'd perhaps be more amenable to different explanations for the location discrepancy if many of these accounts hadn't changed their location to the "correct" location now. I could see a legit media account being run from a location outside the place they're reporting on. But the fact that the three accounts listed above immediately changed their location to Gaza or Palestine makes it more likely that these are just not real accounts and should never have been shown as "verified."

"If governments want to regulate how a word is used in their country (e.g. “organic” and “car” vs. “truck”), they should pass a law with a definition."

This feels like an unreasonable thing to say. If that were the case, and all relevant words involved in government action had to be defined in a law, you couldn't sign any contracts because no relevant word would have any meaning that a government could ascertain. You would have no idea if the description on any packaged good actually meant anything, because most of the words on there are not "organic," "car," or "truck." Companies could make any claim they wanted in their ads. Laws would mean nothing, because they use all kinds of different words.

Even in this idiotic post-truth world we live in now, where African Ivanka Trump fan accounts post incendiary shit to make Americans hate each other, words have meaning.

@Plume The article uses the Ivanka account as an example of one that didn’t claim to be in the US. What’s the lie? People all over the world comment on US politics. Some of them may be expats, some not. If an account is not claiming to be a real person/organization, so basically anon, I think what it posts is waaaay more important than which country it’s supposedly associated with. To the extent that the engagement isn’t faked, people are following and retweeting because they like the content. I don’t think they see themselves as victims that need to be protected by the EU.

To the more general point, it seems like this change revealed some latent deception. But now that the cat’s out of the bag, it’s not clear how the feature can be made to work reliably. Maybe they should just remove it.

The point of a definition isn’t because otherwise no word “would have any meaning.” It’s for when the interpretation is not obvious because the word has been used in different ways or you want to make it clear precisely what is being required of the parties. That’s exactly the case here.

It seems like a contradiction to say that it’s so obvious what “verified” means that it doesn’t need to be defined, and people take it to mean the profile is “proved to be true,” yet the location field is there and is unreliable even for accounts verified using your preferred method.

My point with the Ivanka account is that it should never have been verified. What does it mean for an anonymous account to be verified? There is no upside to sticking a "verified" label on an anonymous account besides giving it false credibility and misleading users about what they're looking at.

"Maybe they should just remove it."

I agree. The change provided some insight for a short time, but now it has become misleading.

"It’s for when the interpretation is not obvious because the word has been used in different ways"

But it really hasn't. I think that's at the core of our disagreement.

The blue checkmark with a verified label had a clearly defined meaning until Twitter decided it could make more money by misleading its users. It hadn't been used in different ways before Twitter decided to monetize it. In fact, Twitter would likely not have been able to monetize it so effectively if the meaning had been diluted beforehand.

"It seems like a contradiction to say that it’s so obvious what “verified” means that it doesn’t need to be defined, and people take it to mean the profile is “proved to be true,” yet the location field is there and is unreliable even for accounts verified using your preferred method."

Yes, that's why I agree the location field should be removed again. It was useful when it revealed information that accounts thought was private, but now that people know how it works, it's no longer useful.

@Plume Yes, they are trying to monetize, but I don’t think that means there’s no value to the eligibility criteria, even for anon accounts. I agree with you that Twitter hadn’t used the word in different ways before, but there are decades of history of other sites using “verified” to mean all sorts of things, often less stringent than even the current Twitter criteria.

I’m not sure what you mean about removing the location again. The user-entered value is still there now, and it was present and obviously untrustworthy even under the old verification regime.

"but there are decades of history of other sites using “verified” to mean all sorts of things"

I don't remember anyone talking about verified accounts before Twitter, and even if they did, if someone is talking about verified accounts now, they're talking about the type of verification Twitter had before it started monetizing verification.

"I’m not sure what you mean about removing the location again"

I mean that Twitter's ostensibly correct location information should be removed, since it appears trustworthy but isn't. And if Twitter can't verify the location field entered by users, then verified accounts shouldn't have a location field at all. But with actual verification, Twitter could verify the accuracy of the location field.

@Plume How does “actual verification” prove that a traveling journalist is actually in Gaza?

It doesn't need to, as I said above: "I could see a legit media account being run from a location outside the place they're reporting on."

For a traveling journalist, there is a logical explanation for why their verified location will not always be the same as the place they are currently reporting from. Twitter could still verify that the person is who they say they are, and that their verified location is consistent with how they portray themselves on the website.

Network of Scottish X accounts go dark amid Iran blackout
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/25759181.network-scottish-x-accounts-go-dark-amid-iran-blackout/

From the article:

"One such account, known as ‘Fiona’, has not posted since Thursday.

"The account, which describes itself as “a proud Scottish lass” and “passionate about Scotland's independence & our right to self-determination”, is based in Europe (according to X’s location data).

"However, this is likely due to the use of a VPN which obscures the country or region the account is located in."