Twitter New Feature Tells Users When Accounts Aren't Phone-Number Verified

With talks of bots on Twitter becoming a real issue, the platform has decided to release a new feature that could help users identify the accounts that are phone number verified and those that aren't.

New Feature Shows if an Account Uses a Verified Phone Number

With Elon Musk highlighting bots on Twitter, there have been a lot of users that have started calling for changes to be made regarding how accounts are identified in order to figure out which ones are more legit compared to others.

Jane Manchun Wong, an engineer, was able to dig up a Twitter label that would show whether the account had a verified phone number. She also shared another test feature that would show users the view counts for tweets.

Another Twitter Feature Shows View Count for Each Tweet

According to the story by The Verge, some people were already able to see the number of views their tweet was able to get through the label "analytics." She did, however, note that it remains unclear if only the author would be able to view the data or if the audience could view the data as well.

Another icon would appear next to the react count showing an eye and the number of people that have seen the post. As seen on Jane Manchun Wong's tweet, this would result in four metrics showing under the tweet.

'Blue Check' Accounts Need Email Addresses and Verified Phone Numbers

The process of linking an account to the users' phone numbers is one way "to highlight that it was created with more effort than the simplest macro." The feature could also help users filter out certain tweets that would not be able to get past certain levels of filters.

Luckily, the new feature doesn't limit one account per number as it was noted that users can have up to ten accounts with just a single number. The verified "blue check" accounts already require the owner of the account to attach an email address and have a verified phone number.

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Encouragement of Verified Phone Numbers Comes with Data Security Concern

The former CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, talked about certain plans to allow everyone to verify their accounts. The feature was then described to be similar to either how Airbnb or Tinder uses phone numbers as a part of the whole verification process.

With the new feature encouraging people to verify their accounts, data security becomes another important topic. On August 5th, Twitter actually announced that an attack led to 5.4 million account names that were linked to phone numbers and email addresses being accessed.

The privacy flaw was actually introduced in an update that launched on June 2021 but Twitter was not yet aware of it until July when the issue started to circulate in the media with reports of someone "trying to sell the database."

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This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Urian B.