It's the old tech cliché: "Because it doesn't scale." Which is just an excuse for "We're lazy and don't want to spend money on things that don't directly benefit our cafeteria and office toys."

After quitting Facebook a couple of years ago, I tried to log in to my Facebook account back in December to say Merry Christmas to some people, but I am locked out. Facebook asked me to send in a government photo ID, which I did. Nothing has happened since.

Responsibility doesn't scale. Accountability doesn't scale. Service doesn't scale. Doing the right thing doesn't scale.

On the plus side, I'm still not using Facebook.

I read that as: After quitting Facebook as an employee a couple of years ago

Which made this:

> I tried to log in to my Facebook account back in December to say Merry Christmas to some people, but I am locked out. Facebook asked me to send in a government photo ID, which I did. Nothing has happened since.

Sound so very petty and cold blooded. You know, the Facebook we all know and love ;)

> When you get caught you get booted off the platform.

Which may not actually be a problem for most people. The thing that's stopping me from selling my Twitter account to a disinformation network is not my fear of losing access to Twitter, it's that I care about the problem of disinformation and don't want to see myself in the news for something like that.

I'm sure there are thousands of people who'd sell a simply-verified Twitter account, and they probably wouldn't even demand that much. People are already spending hours a day trying to sell their nudes, and still only making a few hundred dollars total (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/business/onlyfans-pandemi...).

There's also a built-in compensating factor: To the extent that twitter accounts are worthless, it's easy to buy them. To the extent that twitter accounts are an important part of your identity online, people will tend to protect them. Try getting people to sell you their social security numbers.

Right now they're closer to the "worthless" end of that spectrum. But maybe verification would change that?

I don't think that's a problem if your goal is disinformation or manipulation: the report this network details consisted of only 14 accounts.

> There's also a built-in compensating factor: To the extent that twitter accounts are worthless, it's easy to buy them. To the extent that twitter accounts are an important part of your identity online, people will tend to protect them. Try getting people to sell you their social security numbers.

> Right now they're closer to the "worthless" end of that spectrum. But maybe verification would change that?

I guess I'm disputing the presumption that Twitter accounts will ever be that valuable across all the members of society that the risk of loosing access to Twitter will be enough of a deterrent to any particular rando out there. Twitter's appeal seems to be mainly limited to certain slices of society (e.g. politicians, political pundits, and wannabes), and there are probably far more people outside those slices than inside them. If a rando waitress can get a verified Twitter account, and such accounts are useful for spreading disinformation, the GRU and black-hat PR agencies will probably be able to get all the accounts they'll ever need for something on the order of ~$100 a pop.

in this case, an average user selling verified account would risk legal and financial consequences. It's unlikely spammers and other bots would be able to afford buying such accounts in mass.

And additionally verified accounts would be out of touch for any censorship.

How about no.

Twitter could certainly make a new check system, but it would likely be (ab)used the sameway, eventually.

The complete failure of the PGP “web of trust” is a precedent.