For a few weeks now I have been working as a verifier on the Eurosky/mu.social platform. The foundation I chair, Kripties, has been designated a trusted verifier on the European social network. I can now place a mark next to someone else's account that says 'this account is who it claims to be'. I say so with excitement and, precisely for that reason, I have started to think about what it means to vouch that someone is who they claim to be, and who has the authority to do so.
The verification badge is that mark we all recognise. It has never meant just one thing. When Twitter invented it, in 2009, it meant two: that the account was authentic, that is, controlled by whoever claimed to control it, and that its holder was someone notable, a celebrity, a politician, a media outlet, someone worth protecting from impersonation. The mark certified identity and relevance at once, and it was granted by the company, free of charge, to whomever it chose. Then, in 2022, the same mark changed meaning: it came to indicate, above all, that the account pays a monthly subscription. The badge was no longer earned; it was bought. And at Meta, verification also requires showing an official identity document. Three companies, three different things under the same icon: notoriety, payment, document. The badge is the same; what it promises is not.
The network on which I now verify does something the others do not: instead of keeping verification to itself, it opens it up to trusted third parties, who are themselves verified. It is not a company that decides, account by account, who is authentic. It is organisations that know the people who vouch for them. A university verifies its lecturers because it knows who they are. A media outlet, its journalists. A cultural foundation, the artists in its field whom it knows. Trust does not come down from a single authority; it is woven between entities that answer for people they really know. This is, its creators say, how trust works in real life: you do not trust a stranger because a central office certifies them, but because someone who knows them steps forward to say 'I will vouch for this person'. That a platform shares out this power instead of keeping it to itself strikes me as a generous gesture, and an uncommon one.
My enthusiasm for the model does not stop me from seeing that it still has things to resolve, which is what they are: the rough edges of something young. Sharing out the power to verify does not make it disappear altogether: someone decides which organisations may verify, so there is still a central point of decision, albeit a far more open one than that of a single company. Error is shared out too: each verifier can get it wrong, endorse an account that later changes hands, or keep an endorsement that has lapsed. That is why Kripties, before verifying anyone, has set itself its own rules on whom it endorses and on what criteria; the badge one issues carries one's name, and with it one's credibility. And the biggest challenge remains, one its own creators acknowledge: those who do not belong to any recognisable organisation, who work outside institutions, still have no clear path to being verified. The model avoids the old hierarchy of fame and opens the door to many more people, but it does not yet reach everyone.
None of those rough edges makes me prefer the previous model, the badge that is bought or that a single company grants from above. Quite the opposite: they are the pending adjustments on a path heading in the right direction. Verification, however you look at it, is always someone vouching that someone is who they claim to be. The real question is who that someone is and what they actually know about you. It may be a company that charges you, a state that asks for your ID card, or an organisation that knows you and vouches for you. Of those three, the last is the one that most resembles how we trust in life away from screens.
It is a small act of trust. A network built from many such acts, between people and institutions that know each other, looks more like a community than a register. It is not the automatic trust of an algorithm, nor the bought trust of a subscription: it is the trust that someone grants to someone else. Helping to weave it, in a diverse and friendly network, strikes me as a modest and good way of being on the internet.
On the open conversation
I write this from a position I declare openly: I am a verifier on the mu network, so I am not looking at the matter from outside. I start from that fact to think about something more general: who has the authority to vouch that an account is who it claims to be, and how that has changed between the badge granted by a company, the badge that is bought, the one that requires an ID document and the one handed out by organisations that know you. I do not present any model as the solution: I argue that they all shift the same problem to different places, and I point out what the distributed model, mine, does not solve either. I distinguish verified fact (how each system works) from my interpretation. If anyone wishes to contribute from the fields of digital identity, platform governance or the sociology of trust, this notebook remains open.
Sources
mu.social and Eurosky (a programme of Stichting Modal, a Dutch foundation): terms, privacy policy, and verification programme ("democratic verification"; "an account is who they claim to be"; "verification should never be paid for"). mu operates on the AT Protocol, is independent of BlueSky, and its client derives from a fork of the BlueSky client. Presented in June 2026.
Twitter/X verification: free programme for notable accounts since 2009; linked to payment (X Premium) since November 2022; removal of legacy badges on 20 April 2023.
Meta Verified: announced on 19 February 2023, with authentication by official ID document for creators; available in Spain since 5 July 2023.
The caveats about distributed verification (central authority in the designation of verifiers, displacement of error, unequal institutional legibility) come from Eurosky's own documentation and from the general literature on distributed identity.