So it seems that X’s current “verification” system won’t be good enough for its upcoming payments offering, with new code snippets suggesting that it’ll be partnering with ID provider Persona to confirm people’s real identity.
As you can see in this code element, posted by MacRumors analyst Aaron Perris, X is seemingly set to incorporate Persona’s confirmation processes for “safety and security, fraud prevention and payments purposes.”
Persona already partners with a range of online platforms for user ID confirmation, including LinkedIn and YouTube, with Persona’s process using government-issued ID and facial scanning to confirm that you are, indeed, who you claim to be.
Which is obviously even more important when it comes to facilitating payments, though it is interesting that X won’t be adding this into its official verification process, through X Premium, but rather as an add-on to meet its expanded requirements.
Verifying social media user IDs has long been a point of contention, with some suggesting that blue tick-style verification should be available to anyone who provides official documentation, as a means to combat bots and trolls.
Indeed, that’s what X owner Elon Musk also seemed to envision after he took over at the app, via his plan to sell checkmarks to everyone, which he hoped would eventually see so much take-up that the only accounts not verified would be bot identities.
For some reason, Musk thought that millions of X users would be clamouring to pay $8 per month (or more in his initial plan) for a blue tick, which would subsequently dilute the capacity of bots, by both making them cost-prohibitive to create, and causing them to stand out in stream.
But that didn’t work. Less than 1% of X users currently pay for X Premium, with the “checkmarks for all” approach only really working to dilute the value that the tick symbol once represented.
As such, X’s verification system, much like Meta’s, now only represents people who are willing to pay, with little in the way of ID confirmation requirements (on X at least) to stop paying users from misrepresenting others or hiding their identity.
I mean, that should be the ultimate pathway to secure X Payments, right? If you want to use X Payments, confirm your ID, via X Premium, with the blue tick only awarded to those who’ve gone through the process. A simple marker, with clear meaning, that stands out in-stream.
Yet, that could also complicate the Premium/verification checkmark process, so instead, X is partnering with a third-party for official verification, while offering its own “verification”, in quotation marks, to anyone, for a price.
I don’t know, seems convoluted, while it’s also interesting that a key impediment for broad scale ID verification has always been labor load, and the fact that the platforms simply don’t have the resources available to confirm every users’ ID.
It seems that they’ve now found a solution. LinkedIn has confirmed the IDs of 80 million of its members through this process thus far, and it does appear, based on this example, that large-scale ID confirmation is actually possible, and could offer a more accountable means to combat trolls and bots in social apps.
Basically, if X were really serious about combating bots, it would make all users confirm their ID through Persona, not just those looking to use its payments option, which may or may not be coming sometime soon.
Theoretically, Meta could do the same. I mean, there are limits on the capacity of Persona, and it doesn’t offer ID confirmation in all markets, so you would need other regional partners as well.
But really, what we’re seeing, over time, is that it is possible to confirm user IDs, and that could add important accountability to all social apps.
Some people will disagree, and there are strong arguments also around the value of enabling people to use different names, and maintain anonymity online.
But weighed against the risks and dangers of such, and matched against the technical capacity to offer ID confirmation at scale, I would suggest that there is real benefit to such.
