If you were on the internet over the last week you probably heard that Elon Musk bought up stock in Twitter to the point he is now the largest single shareholder. Musk started Tweeting, like a college kid who decided to try the big Adderall for the first time, turned down a board seat, deleted some tweets, and got sued by other Twitter shareholders. A normal week for Musk. One of Musk’s now-deleted Twitter threads was however on the right track. The idea of expanding verification. Musk floated a few ways to do it, from charging a low monthly fee, to making everyone fork over IDs. I’ve been loudly arguing for expanding Twitter verification for years now. Giving out more blue checks has harms and advantages, but would certainly make the platform feel a little more human. Something that is little discussed is how well Tinder has handled verification. If you’ve seen those blue stars on Tinder, you’ll know it just means someone took a few photos. To get verified on Tinder, users have to take a few photos, mimicking models’ facial expressions. Those photos are processed by a combination of AI and human review to decide if a person is a person. Tinder’s approach to verification means little more than that an account is probably not a bot. This sidesteps the problems that come when verification is seen as an endorsement. Twitter paused verification back in 2017, after verifying someone associated with hate groups. The outrage was largely fueled…Hey Elon Musk, Tinder Imperfectly Cracked Verification, So Can Twitter