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Sounds just like the 'real names' policy that Google and Facebook have tried before. That never made any difference to hate speech, racism and intolerance, so why do you think it will magically make Twitter better?


I can imagine at minimum this would help with bots. Considering the problems you state are actual systematic issues we have in our society I would expect that the verification process should not be perceived as working towards solving those.


I have no idea how comment bots run today, but for anyone only slightly invested, it would mean one additional hurdle (get accounts for actual people who are not using the service), but not a blocker (like captchas: they mostly serve to annoy regular users).


That seems like a pretty large hurdle, compared to today where it seems they're just creating as many accounts as they want. There isn't a single political tweet without a bunch of bot garbage as replies. I assume any name with 8 digits at the end is a bot and an auto-block (and these are all over political tweets), but there are so many more tweets that are highly suspicious once you go in and look at their feed.


It would also exclude venerable people which is the problem with the real name idea


We can imagine a system where twitter checks that person is a real unique human but does not use their personal data for anything else.


Like when they used mobile phone numbers given for security purposes for marketing?


Until the next hack links their real name with their handle? No thanks.


How to verify uniqueness?


*vulnerable, presumably


Because the world is in a different place now. As long as twitter doesn't make it mandatory, it should work. Those that want a bit of decency on Twitter can get verified and have the knowledge that the people they converse with are who they say they are, and those that do not can carry on using Twitter in the same way they always have.




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