Elon Musk Wants to Authenticate All Twitter Users

Behind the ‘will-he-won’t-he’ and the ‘can-he-can’t-he’ stories of Elon Musk’s attempts to acquire Twitter lurks another equally interesting tussle about identity, and how we assert and verify it when we are not physically present.

The probable new owner of Twitter has on many occasions remarked that he wants to ‘authenticate all actual individuals’ on the microblogging and social networking service. Musk’s desire to authenticate Twitter users is motivated by one of his major concerns about how Twitter operates, namely how it can be manipulated by spam accounts, and particularly those that promote cryptocurrency schemes. Musk has stated that cryptocurrency spam bots are Twitter’s ‘single most bothersome thing’.

Musk’s idea to ‘authenticate all actual humans’ as part of his approach to combat bitcoin bots aims to make it easy to distinguish between real and false accounts.