Verification! Impersonation! Twitter Blue! There’s a lot going on around identity on Twitter — let’s break down what our policies are, and some of the big questions we still need to answer…

First, impersonation has always been banned on Twitter. Misleading profiles make Twitter worse for everyone. Last year, we banned more than half a million accounts for impersonating people and brands. transparency.twitter.com/en/reports/rules-enforcement.html

Parody has long been recognized as an important form of speech, and we have clear, long-standing guidelines about how to operate parody accounts on Twitter in a non-misleading way: help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/parody-account-policy

When Verified accounts use impersonation as a tactic — whether for parody or not — it creates an especially confusing experience. It’s been our long-standing practice to suspend Verified users when they do this.

The planned changes to Twitter Blue to make Verification more widely available raise the stakes for this kind of impersonation. Here’s what we’re going to do about it:

In the short term, we’ll ramp up proactive review of Blue Verified accounts that show signs of impersonating another user. When we find them, we’ll suspend them. See something that looks off? You can report it directly in the app.

We’re particularly focused on the risks of impersonation of public officials in the context of the US 2022 midterm elections, and have made the decision not to launch Verification for Twitter Blue until after Election Day.

Long-term, I think we need to invest more in identity verification as a complement to proof-of-humanness. Paid Verification is a strong (not perfect) signal of humanness, which helps fight bots and spam. But that’s not the same thing as identity verification.

For years, Verification on Twitter has been tricky because it’s a signal both of authenticity (you are who you say you are) and notability (you’re “important” by some standard).

Notability is inherently difficult to determine in a fair way globally. I support getting rid of it.

Proof-of-humanness is more straightforward. Most spam-fighting is a numbers game: Your objective is to raise the costs on spammers until their losses exceed their gains. When you do that, the spammers go away, and you win. $8 per account raises the costs of spam A LOT.

It’s not just the $8, though — this kind of in-app purchase requires bad actors to get through not only Twitter’s defenses, but also those of mobile device manufacturers and payment processors. That’s not impossible for a sophisticated adversary — but it’s hard to do at scale.

No solution to identity is perfect, and we’re iterating quickly to come up with the best approach here. We appreciate all the feedback, and will share more as our work progresses.