Twitter announced a couple of weeks ago that it is bringing back the verification process for Twitter accounts. The company shared a new policy for how it will provide the verification badge, and now, the company has revealed that it will start enforcing this policy on January 20, 2021, which is also when the company will begin automatically removing the verified badge from inactive and incomplete accounts.
Twitter asked the public for feedback regarding the new policy and gathered over 22,000 survey responses. On the basis of feedback, the company did make changes to the new policy including the change where there is no longer a need to have a bio or header image for one’s profile to be complete.
The company has realised that measuring the minimum follower count requirement on a per-country basis wasn’t always the right approach, so they updated this to be on a per-region basis to make the follower count requirements less susceptible to spam and more equitable across geographies.
Read More: Twitter is bringing back the Blue verification Badge in 2021
Twitter has revamped the “News” category to include “News and Journalists” and the “Sports” category to include “Sports and esports” to be more inclusive. Twitter also added a reference in their “Entertainment” category to more clearly include digital content creators.
Twitter says that it will explore more categories in the coming future, relating to scientists, academics, religious leaders and more. Also, as per the new policy, a complete account is defined as the one that has either a verified email address or phone number, a profile image and a display name.
“If your account is at risk of losing its verified badge, you’ll receive an automated email and an in-app notification informing you of what changes need to be made to avoid automatic removal of your blue verified badge. As long as you make those changes before January 20, 2021, your account will not lose its badge”, Twitter says in a blog post.
“We are not planning to automatically remove the verified badge from inactive accounts of people who are no longer living, and are working on building a way to memorialize these accounts in 2021”, it adds.
Twitter will also take away the verified badge from those accounts that are found violating Twitter’s rules repeatedly.