Talk of Elon Musk buying Twitter has hit a snag in the recent few months, with various reasons being cited, one of them being the percentage of bots on the platform compared to real users.
This culminated with Elon Musk pinning a Tweet in reference to the matter. “I hereby challenge @paraga (Twitter’s CEO) to a public debate about the Twitter bot percentage. Let him prove to the public that Twitter has <5% fake or spam daily users!” reads a tweet posted by Elon on his Twitter account.
While Twitter’s CEO was not obviously going to reply to such a post, an increasing number of users are putting the platform under pressure to change how it identifies accounts and introduce a way users would be able to identify those that are more legit than others.
Engineer Jane Manchun Wong on Twitter reports that this might be already in the testing phase, as she posted a screenshot showing a Twitter label that puts a mark on accounts with a verified phone number.
She also mentions another new feature showing view counts for tweets. However, this is a feature that a few users might already have access to for their own tweets under the label of “analytics” She is however unsure whether the tweet’s view count will be visible to the public or restricted to the account owner.
Accounts having linked phone numbers is a way to show that the account had some effort behind it in being created, and could potentially be used to identify which tweets appear to the biggest percentage of users.
If you have more than one account and would like to link them all to a single phone number, Twitter allows up to ten accounts to be linked to the same phone number, while developers can mark their bot accounts to caution people they might not be interacting directly to a human being.
The downside of having phone numbers linked with accounts means that coming up with a secure means to keep the data safe becomes an issue. Twitter has already had security breaches this month, with 5.4 million account names linked with certain phone numbers and email addresses finding their way to an attacker.
Twitter notes that the attacker used a privacy flaw that has been in existence on the platform since June 2021, and they had no idea about it until reports started coming out in July of this year that someone was trying to sell the database.
There is also the 2020 incident that had accounts of major personalities Tweet about Bitcoin, which makes the whole point of adding phone numbers to accounts ill-advised as it only adds your phone number to a database that will eventually be exploited.
At the moment, the linked account badge is not yet out in the public, and Twitter has not yet put out a statement regarding the introduction and whether linked accounts will be given more trustworthiness when it comes to their content being shown to more people.
