Farcaster

In retrospect, the decision that did more to cripple Twitter as a reliable source of information was the elimination of the old verification system. While it was imperfect and implied a natural inegalitarianism it actually helped a lot to know who was really a government official or representative of an institution from whom accountability could be expected. It has since transformed into verification merely of who has paid $8 a month, as well as a marker of engagement-grifting for economic gain. It is hard to emphasize how damaging this is during a crisis where verifying accuracy of information is paramount.

Most people, including myself, continue to use Twitter out of habit and because of sunk costs and network effects of over a decade of usage. But a new social media platform should consider some form of verification system that identifies institutional associations. That is how Twitter originally became the place where official communications happened. I doubt it'd become that again from scratch today.

Writer, podcaster, and commentator on foreign affairs and politics. Runs /dropglobalnews

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The nice thing about FC is that someone could create a 3rd service which did something like verify users and expose it in an API.

The hard part would then be convincing clients (like Warpcast) to expose this badge to end users.  Of course anyone could make their own client which does this too.