Twitter will soon let organizations verify related accounts

Less than two days after Twitter’s first attempt to charge for account verification ended in disaster, Elon Musk announced the company is working on a new way to authenticate users. On Sunday afternoon, he tweeted the social media website would soon begin rolling out a feature that will allow organizations to identify accounts that are “actually” associated with them.

Musk didn’t say as much, but the feature is almost certainly a partial response to the problems the platform encountered this past week. After the company began rolling out its new $8 per month Twitter Blue subscription on Wednesday, the website was quickly overrun by trolls who used the service to impersonate celebrities and brands. In particular, the situation was a nightmare for businesses and advertisers. As one example, pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly’s stock fell by 4.37 percent on Friday after a fake “verified” account said the company was making insulin free. The prank erased about 15 billion from Eli Lilly’s market cap and forced an apology from it.

The announcement would …read more