Twitter now wants your government ID. And no, this isn’t Clickbait. X, I know X has introduced a new verification requirement for the blue users, where they must submit a live selfie and a picture of their government issued ID. Thus, I know me and a hat. The purpose is apparently to enhance safety and security, particularly to prevent impersonations.
Let’s discuss this for about four minutes. I’m gonna split this video into two parts. In the first part, we’re gonna look at the real reason Elon wants this data. And in the second part, we’re gonna ignore the real reason he wants this data and look at still why we shouldn’t give it to him. So unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 18 months, you’re probably becoming increasingly aware that the 1% want all of our data. Why? Because data is basically the new goal. And don’t just take my word for it. Here’s a Forbes article called data is the New Gold. Jess Little Bookshop wants to know all your purchases and viewing data. Zuckerberg wants to know all of your friends, your social graph and your likes. And Elon wants to create the one app, which is fine, except he doesn’t want to create the one app. He wants to take a once very useful tool and modify into the one app. And so far, the user base have told him to go and himself, but he’s routinely not listening. I mean, at this point, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t even read his Twitter DMs, unlike on Amazon, where you’re verified by your credit card information or on Facebook, where you tend to use your real name to make friends. Twitter has a long history of allowing people to create anonymous profiles or use fake names because they want to post freely there sometimes dodgy political opinions, thoughts or beliefs, or because your group’s name is called anonymous and it’s kind of on brand for you. And in a free speech society, that should all be okay, even if you don’t agree with what’s being said. Other users proudly put their jobs or employers in their bio or tweet information that makes it personally identifiable. So to me, although this will verify some people, but on the site are people, it’s more about Elon having government verified information on each user to sell to advertisers than actually verifying users. Surely it’s easier to identify bots than verifying people in this way, especially as a ton of third party apps or places have run an analysis on Elon’s own followers and discovered an alarming number of bots. Surely if third party apps can identify the bots, the man with access to the backend data on the website can identify them and easier. And here’s the thing, bots have been interfering with our elections for years. But I think even if we got rid of every single bot, we’d still see a spike in politically targeted adverts in both the next you UK general election and the US presidential election.
So now we’ve looked at the real reason. Elon, what’s our data? Let’s ignore that and take it a face value. Let’s assume it has nothing to do with marketing or advertising, even though we know for a fact it’s the business model the entire website is built on. Let’s look at the proposed verification process and why we shouldn’t give him our government IDS. TLDR, the uploaded government IDS will be stored and processed by an Israeli company called Book 10 tick, octentic Oct tick. I have no idea how you say this company’s name. This company will keep this information for up to 30 days or one lives trust term. In No. 10, some users are unhappy about this company storing their data because it has ties to the Israeli intelligence and Israeli intelligence already use facial recognition technology in horrific ways. They also have concerns about data breaches slash leaks. Gosh, I’m starting to think Elon might not be one of the good guys.
Musk, who owns Twitter, remember, has already completed the verification process, heavily implying that the system is operational and might be rolled out to the public soon. He says it’s fine, which is about as reassuring as Ross in series 7 of friends. I’m fine, I’m fine. Thing. I’m fine. But, and I can’t say this enough, he owns the company. He can have all of his data deleted off the service and double check it’s been done at any time. We don’t get that luxury. Once more, for the people at the back.
This is all ignoring the fact that some people don’t have government IDS, like people under the age of 16. And putting aside my personal belief that people under the age of 16 should be on that site, this is still gonna be a problem. This is also ignoring the fact that some accounts are bravely anonymously tweeting about issues in their country and by submitting their government ID, you’re cutting them off or silencing them by proxy.
Previously, I did a full video on why making Twitter’s blue ticks a commodity is a bad idea and it will confuse people. And it has, which you can find somewhere linked on the screen now and link below in the description. If you like this video, you love that video. But in short, Twitter asking for our government IDS is way more about adding value to our data for their advertisers then it is about protecting us from impersonation and fraud. And they’re trying to paint it like it’s for our own good because it’s always for our own good and we have to pay for the privilege.
And this is all forgetting that this is how we were verifying people before Elon made the blue tick badge a commodity. Previously, to get verified, you would submit your ID to prove you’re who you say you’re. If you weren’t, why would you say you are in the papers, the news every day? You are. And after that was all sorted, Twitter would manually assign you a blue tick so people can actually trust the checkmarks. This on top of the fact that all this data will be processed by a third party company and not Twitter themselves. Mean the entire plan has more red flags than a bullfighter’s convention. And that is why we shouldn’t give Elon our government IDS. Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.