Is DeSantis for real? How his presidential campaign used verification in its launch
What the verified badge tells us about truth and social media in a time of decline trust
A fundraising landing page for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign features a banner message prominently above his new 2024 logo that reads, “Official DeSantis Website” with a blue-and-white checkmark verification badge. The checkmark assures visitors that DeSantis is for real.
A symbol of authenticity on social media, the status of the verification badge has taken a hit since Musk replaced Twitter’s legacy verification program with paid verification. Its placement in DeSantis’ announcement and elsewhere, though, shows the symbol is still used to communicate legitimacy in a time of eroding trust. But how can viewers still know what they’re seeing is actually real when it’s quicker and easier than ever before to make and spread deception?

Spotting fakes is vital for eBay. To promote its Authenticity Guarantee program for online collectibles sales, the online retailer released an ad that shows experts examining a purse, sneakers, and jewelry. The spot prominently features a verification badge and the message “everyone deserves real.” eBay has used the checkmark to promote the program since 2020 when it launched, first for watches over $2,000 and later for sneakers over $100 (see the screenshot above) and trading cards. It guarantees buyers aren’t getting ripped off by knockoffs, and today, the message behind eBay’s campaign feels especially relevant.
Verification for all
Twitter first adopted verification in 2009 to combat impersonations of celebrities, brands, and eventually, anyone who worked at BuzzFeed. Other social media companies soon followed Twitter’s lead. Since Musk changed verification, though, companies have taken the opportunity to reconsider how they use verification badges too, albeit in more productive ways.
Meta introduced a paid verification program of its own that requires government ID, and Google announced verified badges this month for approved brands in Gmail. “This will help users identify messages from legitimate senders versus impersonators,” the search giant wrote in a blog post. Tinder was earlier, introducing verification in 2021.
Verification for eBay is a matter of dollars and cents, strengthening the company’s position in the lucrative and competitive collectables market by giving consumers peace of mind when they make pricey online purchases. Google’s verification offers peace of mind to Gmail users who don’t want to be phished, while for Tinder, it’s those who don’t want to be catfished.
For Twitter, Musk’s play was an attempt to offset hemorrhaging advertising revenue. It has a long way to go. In opening up verification to every Tom, Dick, and Catturd, Musk opened the door for situations like Monday, when faked images believed to be generated by A.I. showing an explosion at the Pentagon spread thanks in part to a paid verified account pretending to be Bloomberg News.
While eBay authenticates its sellers’ sneakers with actual sneakerheads who verify everything from box coloring and tissue paper to stitching and scent, Twitter authenticates with Community Notes (sometimes) while Musk has before linked to a conspiracy theory and amplified misinformation about current events, including about the war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 death count and vaccine.
Musk claimed that legacy verification was a “lords & peasants system,” which in theory dovetails with eBay’s message of “everyone deserves real” and verification for all, but verification on Twitter now only verifies that the user is signed up for Twitter Blue starting at $8/month, unless the checkmark was otherwise gifted by Musk, which some celebrities have received. A checkmark doesn’t mean the same thing on every site.
Verification and Republicans
In Republican politics, every major declared presidential candidate is verified on Twitter except former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and every candidate is tweeting except Trump.
Trump’s social network Truth Social has verification, and it uses a pinkish red badge instead of the standard blue one. The checkmark is designed in the style of the letter T in the site’s logo.
Whereas Merriam-Webster defines “truth” as “the quality or state of being true,” Truth Social defines “Truth” as “a post that you share to those following you.”

“A Truth can be a comment, image, or video and can contain links to other content,” reads the site’s terminology page, encouraging users to Truth their truths and retruth the Truths of others.
If a Truth is just a post, then the men who own the social networks we post determine truth and their algorithms prioritize what we see.
DeSantis doesn’t own his own social network, but his campaign website is designed like one. Instead of a large hero image of the candidate, his headshot appears like an avatar at the top of a feed. Updates are designed like media-rich Tumblr posts linking fundraising landing pages, videos, and his online shop, and a scrolling banner of small dollar-donors’ names, cities, and donation amounts is the only way supporters can “post.” There are lots of emoji and the background is a blue-to-red gradient.
“Truth must be our foundation,” DeSantis said during his Twitter Space with Elon Musk to announce his campaign Wednesday, but his launch could have used some Community Notes. He called reports of Florida book bans a “hoax,” but PEN America, a free speech advocacy group, found 566 books were banned outright or banned pending an investigation in Florida school districts during the 2021-2022 school year. Fact checkers at NBC 6 in South Florida found examples of false or misleading claims DeSantis made during the event too.
An outside group supporting DeSantis was also caught manipulating footage used in an ad. The DeSantis-aligned super PAC Never Back Down added a fake fighter jet flyover to footage of him taking the stage at an event in an ad titled “A President for the People,” according to Axios. Footage of the event posted to YouTube six months ago shows DeSantis taking the stage but no sign or sound of jets.

Fixing verification
“If everything is politics, and politics is a series of lies, then there is no truth,” historian and author Jill Lepore wrote in “These Truths,” her excellent 2018 single-volume history of the United States, which has not been banned from any Florida school.
The old methods of verification are broken, but rebuilding trust in today’s landscape is bigger than just checkmarks. An academic study published in 2019 suggested verification badges weren’t necessarily as credible as one might assume.
In the study, news consumers were asked to evaluate tweets designed to test the role of factors like verification badges and cues about a news outlet’s partisan leanings. Verification didn’t change how people judged credibility, the study found, and respondents looked to other cues, like whether the news source was politically ambiguous or aligned with their personal political views, and sometimes timestamps.
“Our results suggest little attention is paid to the verification mark when judging credibility, even when little other information is provided about the account or the content,” researchers Stephanie Edgerly and Emily Vraga wrote in the paper, which was published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.
They recommended the site consider changes like being more selective of who’s verified, or in the event of universal verification, making badges a different color for nonprofits, government, media, news, and other categories.
In an open, free, and diverse society that values the exchange of ideas, no one will ever agree on the solutions for everything, but forging a common consensus around our mutual values to confront today’s problems together requires shared facts that can be verified. Everyone deserves real.
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