X Rolls Out ID Verification for X Premium Users

After experimenting with the choice over the past few months, X has now launched its recent ID verification element for X Premium subscribers, which can enable paying users to verify their identity, via government-issued ID, with a view to have an extra marker added to their X profile.

As you possibly can see, the brand new process will enable users to verify their identity via an identical process that uses each your license (or equivalent) and a selfie taken within the confirmation steps. Twitter’s partnered with “forensic identity intelligence” company au10tix for the method, which can lessen the manual labor load on X itself, but will even mean that X users shall be sharing their data with each firms as a part of the method.

As noted within the above screen, au10tix will keep biometric data on file for 30 days. X, nonetheless, will keep it on file indefinitely, for “related safety and security purposes”.

X also recently updated its terms of service to account for this extra data, though what exactly X plans to make use of this info for is unclear as yet.

At present, verifying your ID is an optional process, and adds nothing greater than an additional note in your profile, which is accessible by tapping in your blue checkmark.

But functionally, you don’t need to offer ID to get a verification tick within the app, you simply need a phone number and a checking account. Which somewhat belies the “verification” title, because it’s not actually verifying anything, yet, at the identical time, there’s nothing that gets moreover unlocked by confirming your actual information.

Not less than, not yet.

In X’s overview notes on ID verification, it states that:

“X currently focuses on account authentication to forestall impersonation, and will explore additional measures, akin to ensuring users have access to age-appropriate content and protecting against spam and malicious accounts, to take care of the integrity of the platform and safeguard healthy conversations.”

So perhaps, in future, X could look to age-gate content, and also you’ll must undergo the ID verification process to access adult material. Which might probably be step, though it may hit X within the usage stats, so it probably doesn’t have a heap of motivation to enact this.

X also says that those that confirm their ID “may receive additional advantages” in future, including faster checkmark approval, and the flexibility to vary your profile details (photo and display name) without losing your blue tick till the X team reviews every such update.

Nevertheless it does appear to be X is constructing towards something greater with this.

Ideally, ID confirmation can be built into X’s verification system, in order that the verification tick actually means something, aside from “this person is paying us money to make use of the app”. It was that the blue tick was only allocated to notable users (at the least in theory), though even then, the previous Twitter team confirmed the identification of every of those users as a part of the method.

That meant that you may trust that every blue tick account was an actual person, as a minimum, but the brand new X Premium offering (formerly Twitter Blue) has eroded this element, so the tick itself really doesn’t mean anything much anymore.

If X were to make ID confirmation a requirement, that may even be more in keeping with its mission to eliminate bots, which is the stated aim of its verification system.

X owner Elon Musk maintains that paid subscriptions are the one viable pathway to defeating bots, but really, it’s ID checking that’s the core element. The challenge lies in the way you facilitate such at scale, but when X were in a position to partner with verification organizations like au10tix in other regions, that would help to enable this, thus making its verification system a more practical process for highlighting fakes.

Implement easy ID checking, make it a requirement for all accounts, and theoretically, you may eliminate bots entirely inside months, or nonetheless long it takes to verify all lively user identities.

The challenge then is in how these third-party ID checking firms receives a commission for his or her contributions. Does X pay them? Does X charge all users and forward a part of that cost onto these organizations? Would the payment actually be that these organizations get more data, which might be not the perfect arrangement?

Perhaps, if X added one other, lower cost verification process, by which users were simply paying for ID confirmation, which may actually be more popular than the present X Premium system, which costs quite a bit for, really, not much that’s of interest to the overwhelming majority of users.

Perhaps X could charge a one-off $2 fee for ID confirmation, and add a gray checkmark to those accounts. With the added justification of eliminating bots, I think quite a bit more users would sign on, and with checkmark accounts getting priority, that may be a more practical strategy to combat the reach and effectiveness of bot accounts.

It’s not clear what X’s plan are, however it does feel like something more is coming here, that it does have a broader plan for ID confirmation than it just being an added bonus, for no real profit.

We’ll need to wait and see, however it could eventually be an interesting and invaluable addition.