We study the gap between user perceptions of social media verification indicators and their actual meaning, and the type of behavior that emerges when such a gap is present. We use recent changes to Twitter's verification process as a unique case study wherein the meaning of a verification indicator has rapidly shifted. The study consists of a U.S. demographically-representative survey of 300 respondents and quantitative and qualitative analyses of results, and an analysis of verified Twitter accounts sampled from a large-scale dataset of 15 million Tweets collected in October 2022. The survey addresses differences in user-perceived and actual requirements for verification marks on popular social media platforms, with a focus on evolving perceptions of verification marks on Twitter. We find that more than half of survey respondents misunderstood Twitter's criteria for assigning blue verification check marks to user accounts; more than 80% of survey respondents did not understand what differentiated blue check marks from gold and grey check marks. We also note interesting correlations between respondent age and perception of verification marks. From our qualitative analysis of verified user accounts, we find that cryptocurrency promotion accounts constitute significantly more Blue subscribers than our randomly sampled control dataset, indicating that a significant number of Blue users may be leveraging the confusion between legacy and Blue verification to promote their own commodities. Finally, we provide recommendations for improving verification indicators and processes on social media.

翻译：我们研究了用户对社交媒体认证标识的感知与其实际含义之间的差距，以及这种差距存在时出现的用户行为类型。以推特认证流程的近期变化为典型案例，探究认证标识含义快速转变的现象。本研究包含一项覆盖美国人口统计特征的300人问卷调查，并对结果进行了定量与定性分析，同时从2022年10月收集的1500万条推文大规模数据集中抽样分析了认证推特账号。问卷调查聚焦用户对主流社交媒体平台认证标识要求的主观认知与客观标准之间的差异，重点关注用户对推特认证标识认知的演变过程。研究发现，超过半数受访者误解了推特为账户分配蓝色认证对勾的标准；超过80%的受访者不了解蓝色对勾与金色、灰色对勾之间的区别。我们还注意到受访者年龄与认证标识认知之间存在显著相关性。通过对认证用户账号的定性分析发现，加密货币推广账号在蓝V订阅用户中的占比显著高于随机抽样对照组数据集，表明大量蓝V用户可能正利用遗留认证与蓝V认证之间的混淆推广自身商品。最后，我们提出了改进社交媒体认证标识与流程的建议。