Twitter

gavmcfad

With all the talk about twitter recently, i decided to set up an account to see what the fuss was about.
My question is.....how do i know if the people i am following are really who they claim to be.
In other words, what is to stop me pretending to be.....lets say.....Enda Kenny, and getting loads of followers.
I have no intention of doing this by the way.

KeithM89_old

Moved from AH

Cill Dara Abu

Sure ya do'nt

mikemac

Verified accounts have a blue circle with a white tick mark in them

nimrod86

somehow celeb accounts are verified by twitter

eg.

http://twitter.com/#!/BJAofficial

chucken1

gavmcfad wrote: »

With all the talk about twitter recently, i decided to set up an account to see what the fuss was about.
My question is.....how do i know if the people i am following are really who they claim to be.
In other words, what is to stop me pretending to be.....lets say.....Enda Kenny, and getting loads of followers.
I have no intention of doing this by the way.

Im delighted someone asked this.

And while Im here...whats it for??

I see people on here quoting 'such said whatsit' on Twitter 2 seconds ago..Do they go around with their phone telling the world their every move?

gavmcfad

mikemac wrote: »

Verified accounts have a blue circle with a white tick mark in them

I have added 10 people to follow......none have blue circle with a white tick.:(
I take it they are not celebs at all.

PaulPinnacle

gavmcfad wrote: »

I take it they are not celebs at all.

Having a verified account (like the Dalai Lama does) is proof they are who they claim, but not having one doesn't automatically mean they're not. The vast majority of celebrities have unverified accounts.

It's generally quite easy to identify the hoax accounts and the genuine ones. The content they tweet and the way they engage with followers is normally quite telling.

I wouldn't waste too much time on worrying about it personally, follow them if they're interesting to you and unfollow if they're not. The real value of a social platform like Twitter is the social interaction. If you only follow celebrities, you're missing out on the real value.

BenEadir

Like the OP I recently set up a Twitter account and am following 34 people, a selection of sporting, political, news etc.

My question is "Why am I receivbing tweets from people I'm not following?" I just received a tweet from Ross O'Carroll Kelly (RossOCK)who I'm definelty not following. I do follow Tom Dunne (Tomhappens) who may have retweeted it. If someone re-tweets does the tweet appear to arrive from the original source rather than the person who re-tweeted it?

Ben

PaulPinnacle

BenEadir wrote: »

If someone re-tweets does the tweet appear to arrive from the original source rather than the person who re-tweeted it?

Yes, it can. If it's a retweet it will show as the original posters name, followed by two arrows forming a square loop and then "by <person who retweeted it>".

This is assuming they use the native retweet function in Twitter (some people use a more traditional manual typing of "RT" to signify a retweet) and that you're viewing it directly in Twitter via the website. If you're using a client (e.g. Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, etc.) it can/will look slightly different.