Twitter to add 'verified accounts' this summer

In light of the recent happenings regarding the St. Louis Cardinals manager and the fake tweets made in his name by Tony La Russa, it is reported that Twitter has decided to utilize an implementation of "verified accounts" and will begin rolling them out this summer.

Accounts which are verified will feature a special seal, showing that they are authenticated by the person the account claims to be from.



Verification will begin with high profile Twits, artists, athletes, celebrities and the like while eventually expanding to verify a further wealth of accounts.

The fact of the matter remains that with many of the high profile accounts on Twitter, we cannot be sure if their claims are accurate until they verify them in person somehow. As a platform which touts social connection, it isn't optimal that verification have to be done outside of the application and in many ways defeats the efficiency of Twitter, by forcing users to have to research elsewhere to make sure that when someone Twits that they've done something, they actually have done something.