3. Fake accounts: poor insight into what is real and what is fake
Fake accounts on Twitter are of course not new, but due to the explosive growth of the network site, their number has increased significantly. Well-known and lesser-known people, political parties, the Royal Family and various organisations are struggling with online abuse of their names: Mark Rutte , Queen Beatrix , NS , BP , ABN Amro etc. Recently, Twitter caused a stir around the drama in Alphen aan den Rijn. A so-called troll caused a commotion by sending messages as the namesake of Tristan van der Vlis via a fake account. This boy (@tristanalpie) received a huge wave of attention and even the police had to intervene.
How do journalists and other Twitter users actually know whether content from an account is real? Now, most fake accounts are clearly a parody and therefore allowed by Twitter , but how do we deal with accounts that are deliberately misleading, as in the example above?
Twitter once created verified accounts for this reason. The number of verified accounts is currently around 8,700, a paraguay phone number list fraction of the total. Previously, you could submit a request to Twitter to verify your account, but those times are over. No more public requests, but occasional verification of accounts for well-known people or organizations.
It is clear that Twitter does offer value to me. But for some time now I have been wondering how journalists, regular users and organisations can still get as much value out of Twitter now that the network has changed so much? In my opinion, we should take Twitter seriously as a signalling and trend medium in terms of news, but leave the real work to 'the journalist'. As it should be. However, I think that Twitter should help its users process data in order to maintain high quality and not lose its credibility. Of course, I have no insight into Twitter's future plans, but there will be enough organisations and people willing to claim a verified account for a small fee. In this way, Twitter can help users assess the value of an account and its associated content. Another option is to quickly roll out a rating system that allows people to classify accounts, which gives you a better idea of the quality.
Furthermore, users and organizations can get much more out of Twitter if we use the medium more socially . Let's build relationships again, start a dialogue and create value for each other.