They have painted themselves into a corner with this feature. They cannot call it "partners" because you cannot claim to have a partnership with, say, the US Navy and the President of Iran (both "ticked" in Twitter) nor give them revenue kickbacks, and yet, it's not really an ID verification if you "de-verify" people for their political or commercial stance. AFAIK Twitter is so confused by this conundrum that they just froze the "tick" program (or so they claim).

Of course they could abandon all pretenses and just call it "ticked" accounts without saying what it means at all...

And those who lose that status, for whatever reason, will be the "ticked off" accounts.

I can think of one use case for de-verifying: when someone's account seems to have been hacked.

Ok, but when you lose your drivers’ license (or your “friend” “borrows” it) you don’t get your license suspended...

Your case would imply there is a confirmation interval... which I don’t think is the case.

Your passport is "unverified" when you report it stolen.

> I think making it a brand-coloured tick conveyed too much of a positive message so people took it as an endorsement

YouTube's check mark is a tiny unassuming grey thing, and they're going through the exact same process right now where they claim it's being construed as an endorsement.

I think it's being construed as an endorsement because they seem to be using it as an endorsement. Almost every platform has a very opaque process for how one gets verified, and it seems you need to have 100,000+ followers or be deemed to be important in the society to get your humanity verified.

I researched this for the 2018 Reverse Hackathon run by HackMentalHealth and found that in 2015, approximately 0.05% of Twitter accounts were verified (source: https://medium.com/@Haje/who-are-twitter-s-verified-users-af...). The source above has an even deeper breakdown on the verified users' backgrounds.

If they don't want it to be construed as an endorsement, they could let any user not only apply for verification, but actually verify their identity behind their accounts. Not force, but allow it. This could shift the percentage of verified accounts up to the point where they're not part of an exclusive 0.05% club.

If they keep at it 0.05% of the accounts that they deem to be worthy of being verified, then it sure seems like an intentional endorsement.

(my article: https://medium.com/hackmentalhealth/why-twitter-should-verif...)