Twitter to verify accounts for politicians, agencies and other celebs

The increasingly popular microblogging site Twitter recently announced that in response to some controversy related to fake 'celebrity' accounts, it would soon offer a verification process for, "a small set of public officials, public agencies, famous artists, athletes, and other celebs who run the risk of impersonation."  According to the geek news site TechCrunch, such accounts would have a verification seal readily visible.

But there's a problem.  What's a 'public official' and who will decide this?  I think that this will become increasingly important during the next year.  It might seem small to debate whether or not a police chief in a small city is a public official, but when publications like Gawker mine Twitter for interesting stories, and a fake microblogging account publishing something false or harmful in someone's name is permanent, archivable, searchable, discoverable, sharable, and mashupable, fake accounts can mean real damage for relatively 'microcelebrities' without lawyers and public relations teams on retainer, and this includes people running for office.

As far as politics is concerned, I forsee this as an incredibly interesting area of technology intersecting society in somewhat unpredictable ways.  Many people know that  former candidate Barack Obama used new media tools in order to mobilize people and raise an unprecedented amount of money during his successful presidential campaign.  But emerging social technologies have changed the poli/tech landscape in the last six months, and will change it more in the next six.  One thing we haven't yet fully seen is how the strategy of using negative ads in a regulated mainstream media market  translates into a strategy of negative messaging in a relatively unregulated social media market. 

On the other hand, social media sites like Twitter are sure to be close to completely useless in many political races.  While 'trade' publication The Hill tracks the tweets of over 100 members of Congress and political social media consultants like DC-based David All offer simple advice on how to use it to jump-start campaigns, there are many situations in which it's sure to be so close to a waste of time as to be worthless.  I recently spoke with the mayor of a small northern VA city of about 9,000 people, who told me that she wouldn't find these tools useful for communicating with her constituents; to paraphrase her, "Why would I use Twitter when I can visit nearly everyone's house?" 

Despite this, someone like the aforementioned mayor may still want a verified account as a form of "impersonation insurance."  A while back, I wrote about the use of social media by Adriel Hampton, current candidate for a vacant seat in the House of Representatives.  He has a few thousand followers on Twitter, a decently-read blog, and is getting some very modest but important print media coverage in places like Politico - is he a 'public official' or 'celebrity running the risk of impersonation' in the eyes of Twitter?  For his sake, and Twitter's, I hope so.  Otherwise, information warfare between incumbents and challengers (the have's and have-not's of verified celebrity) could have damaging consequences far beyond what sponsored conversations may bring.