YouTube is only the latest platform to botch its verification program

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The modern-day verified social media account was born in June 2009, when the manager of the St. Louis Cardinals sued Twitter because someone had created an account to impersonate him. In the years since, the question of what verification should mean — and who should be eligible to be verified — has bedeviled every social network that’s ever attempted to do it.

The problems with Twitter’s program have long been evident. The process to become verified was, and still remains, opaque; and Twitter began removing verification badges from people who had behaved badly in the real world, causing many people to conflate verification with some kind of moral endorsement. More recently, Twitter said it had “paused” the program so it could work out...

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