Our plans to relaunch verification and what’s next

A couple of weeks ago, we announced that we’re planning to bring back our public verification program in 2021, shared a draft of our new policy, and asked for public feedback to help shape our approach. This new policy will lay the foundation for future improvements by defining what verification means, who is eligible for verification and why some accounts might lose verification to ensure the program is more equitable. Public feedback has become a critical part of our policy development process by making sure our policies reflect the global nature of our service and the people who use it. In the two weeks during our public feedback period, we received more than 22,000 survey responses and learned so much about how we can improve our policy. Thank you for all you shared! How your feedback shaped our policy Here are some of the areas we’ve updated in our new verification policy based on your feedback: We heard feedback that some of the criteria for a profile to be considered “complete” feels too restrictive, so we updated our definition to no longer require a profile bio or header image. We updated our references to Wikipedia to better align with the encyclopedias' published standards for notability and article quality. We’ve clarified the titles of the “News” category to include “News and Journalists” and the “Sports” category to include “Sports and esports'' to be more inclusive. We also added a reference in our “Entertainment” category to more clearly include digital content creators. We heard feedback that measuring the minimum follower count requirement on a per-country basis wasn’t always the right approach, so we’ve updated this to be on a per-region basis to make our follower count requirements less susceptible to spam and more equitable across geographies.