X May Soon Add ID Verification Checks For XBlue Subscribers

While X’s XBlue subscription offering has turn out to be more of an indicator of support for Elon Musk than the rest within the app, could it will definitely turn out to be a more great tool for combating bots and spam, as per its original stated intention?

That might still turn out to be an even bigger focus, with X experimenting with latest ID verification elements, that might provide more assurance within the app.

As you’ll be able to see in this instance shared by app researcher Nima Owji, X is testing a brand new element that might enable XBlue subscribers to confirm their government-issued ID.

But what’s most interesting on this context is that the wording suggests that XBlue subscribers might eventually need to supply government-ID confirmation to unlock all the XBlue features.

At present, you don’t need to supply any official ID documents to get verified within the app, you simply need a phone number and a payment option, and X will accept that you just’re an actual person. Which is clearly not a fool-proof ID method, but X’s view is that “payment verification” is currently enough of a disincentive for bot and spam boosters, because it effectively prices them out of the market, at the very least by way of getting maximum post reach.

X has also put limits on the amount of DMs that non-subscribers can send, and defaulted all users to receiving DMs from subscribers only, which further restricts a non-paying user’s capability to spam others within the app. However it’s still possible for scammers to establish armies of pretend free accounts, and push whatever they need across the X platform. And with only a fraction of the app’s audience paying for XBlue, its full effects as a bot-battling tool aren’t as impactful as they might be.

But when X sought to make users link their government ID to their account, that might set the bar even higher, and further limit the impact of spammers and trolls, at the very least via verified profiles.

And if X then implemented further restrictions, like making all users provide government-issued ID to maintain using the app, that might effectively eliminate bot spam entirely, aligning with considered one of Elon Musk’s key intentions for the app.

But that might also require plenty of manual checking on X’s behalf, which is partly why it’s chosen to go together with paid verification over ID checks. Because with 80% fewer staff, X simply doesn’t have the capability to manually check through people’s ID documents to verify that they’re who they are saying, though it could do that with X subscribers, provided that lower than 0.5% of the app’s users are paying for this service.

The query then is would it not have any real impact?

Needless to say, it could limit the usage of verified profiles for spam, which could actually be a big shift, while it could also likely reduce the misuse of verified profiles for impersonation scams or the like, provided that they might be linked back to an actual person.

At the identical time, many X users would likely be unhappy at having to supply official ID verification, and that would be the backlash that it has to take care of to implement any such process.

However it might be a step in the appropriate direction, and towards addressing considered one of the important focal points of Elon’s purchase of the app.

Really, ID checking is the one method to eliminate spam, but it surely’s just so labor-intensive that no platform is in a position to do it at an efficient enough scale. LinkedIn’s trying out a brand new approach within the U.S., while Meta requires ID confirmation as a part of its Meta Verified service, but no platform has put effective ID verification in place, at scale, as yet.  

It doesn’t appear to be X can accomplish that either, but perhaps, as a method to eliminate misuse by verified accounts, that, in itself, shall be enough to combat serious misuse.