To suffer from unsatiable gadget envy during the information revolution causes stress.
How to obtain a cool little blue thingy next to the Twitter profile picture? How can you verify your Twitter account?
Okay, just as a spoiler for the rest of this article here is the answer: Yes, you can have your Twitter account verified.
To start answering this question one asks your question at the software originator: Twitter.com
Not very helpful as they just say: ‘we are not able to accept public requests for verification’
Right, time to break out the Google Fu and we hit a few hundred websites, some above ground, some underground and some in the air.
After much research and reading quite a few articles about the subject of getting your twitter account verified the conclusion is that you have to ask Twitter to verify your account.
And now the million dollar answer to the question about how you can get your account verified by Twitter.
Step number One:
Make sure that your tweets are public and that you have at least 100 000 followers
Step Two:
Then have your friends create a minimum of ten spoof accounts
Step Three:
Add some tweets to your real account and have your friends tweet outrageous things on the fake accounts
Step Four:
Demand that Twitter remove the fake accounts, when they don’t then go over to begging that they do something, anything and ask real nicely
Step Five:
Wait for it, wait for it , YAY one round blue circly thingy automagically appears next to your profile pic
How bad is Identity theft on social networks and does it really matter?
Identity theft on social networks happen often. What happens more frequently though is that an attention challenged person would impersonate a public or well known person.
Common identity management is often debated or blogged about on the Internet. There are weird individuals that argue for some sort of central identity control or central authentication that will automagically solve all that is evil on the public network. (There are of course the savvy techies that understand the future despotic or control potential and support such initiatives)
Some people are privacy paranoid individuals who violently oppose any such efforts.
@SAPresident has over 100 000 followers and the wannabe @SAPrezident only has just over 5000, still 5000 followers, by contacting some of the wannabe followers it is so that a significant percentage of them thought that they were initially following the real deal. The main reason for their misguided faith is that they saw the profile picture and assumed that is was the chief induna, teflon man himself.