1 research outputs found
What sets Verified Users apart? Insights, Analysis and Prediction of Verified Users on Twitter
Social network and publishing platforms, such as Twitter, support the concept
of a secret proprietary verification process, for handles they deem worthy of
platform-wide public interest. In line with significant prior work which
suggests that possessing such a status symbolizes enhanced credibility in the
eyes of the platform audience, a verified badge is clearly coveted among public
figures and brands. What are less obvious are the inner workings of the
verification process and what being verified represents. This lack of clarity,
coupled with the flak that Twitter received by extending aforementioned status
to political extremists in 2017, backed Twitter into publicly admitting that
the process and what the status represented needed to be rethought.
With this in mind, we seek to unravel the aspects of a user's profile which
likely engender or preclude verification. The aim of the paper is two-fold:
First, we test if discerning the verification status of a handle from profile
metadata and content features is feasible. Second, we unravel the features
which have the greatest bearing on a handle's verification status. We collected
a dataset consisting of profile metadata of all 231,235 verified
English-speaking users (as of July 2018), a control sample of 175,930
non-verified English-speaking users and all their 494 million tweets over a one
year collection period. Our proposed models are able to reliably identify
verification status (Area under curve AUC > 99%). We show that number of public
list memberships, presence of neutral sentiment in tweets and an authoritative
language style are the most pertinent predictors of verification status.
To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first attempt at
discerning and classifying verification worthy users on Twitter