Twitter will mark Spanish official public accounts

What Twitter has become a key tool in current political communication This is something that no one can discuss anymore, and little by little institutional communication follows the same stages. So, on the one hand, we have the accounts of politicians, which they regularly use when performing public functions, and on the other hand, we find accounts associated with public entities, such as ministries, forces and security organizations, public services of all kinds …

Although, unfortunately, much of the noise generated around these Twitter accounts is usually related to the political confrontation in its multiple (and increasingly exhausting) aspects, there is no doubt that its usefulness as a channel of communication with citizens is enormous. The combination of immediacy, global reach and wide accessibility means that, for example, it has become one more part of the ecosystem used by the Civil Guard to disseminate information on missing persons, in order to facilitate their location.

Aware of this usefulness, but also of the taste of elected officials through their social network, Twitter began applying tags to government officials’ accounts in August so that with them, identifying them and verifying their identity is easier for users. This function first reached China, the United States, France, the United Kingdom and Russia, and it seems that the first real tests have been successful, as it will soon be extended to Germany. , Saudi Arabia, Canada, Cuba, Ecuador, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Spain, Honduras, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Japan, Serbia, Thailand and Turkey.

Twitter announced that will activate this function in these 16 countries, including Spain next week, Wednesday February 17th, and one of the first examples of this that we will see will be the personal accounts of heads of state. This nuance is important, since it is a label that will be applied to their personal accounts during their mandate, and not institutional accounts associated with the position, such as the popular @potus (account reserved for the President of the United States in position) or @pontifex (account for the Pope of the Catholic Church).

To continue to help you identify government officials and institutions on Twitter, we are expanding our policy to tag these accounts in more countries.

Next week, you’ll start seeing new profile tags on government accounts in 16 more countries. Https://t.co/RNyrznKQuL pic.twitter.com/poK4vIa5xZ

– Assistance Twitter (@TwitterSupport) 11 février 2021

Lor that it is not yet known (although this is intuitive) is whether Twitter will offer some type of additional protection to these accountsat least as long as their owners remain in office. And if a few months ago we saw what could happen if very relevant accounts were hacked, it suffices to stop for a few seconds to imagine the potential consequences if one of these accounts, identified by Twitter, could fall between bad hands. During last year’s big Twitter hack, many relevant accounts were compromised, but neither Donald Trump’s official Twitter account nor Donald Trump’s personal Twitter account was affected, which prompts us to reflect on this level of additional protection.

We also don’t know if Twitter’s policies will be more loosely enforced in these accounts., as we saw until the beginning of January with the account of Donald Trump, who for a long time published messages going against the rules of the social network, but which were not eliminated due to the visibility that , in the opinion of these responsible, they must have personalities such as presidents, prime ministers and heads of state. It looks like the social network is rethinking this model, so that may not be the case in the end.

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