Twitter Will ‘Verify’ With Colors

A sad, dollar-fueled rainbow

I hear that Twitter’s about to introduce color-coded account verification, and I can’t think of anything other than the iconically terrible Homeland Security Advisory System.

It was introduced in 2002 by a U.S. presidential directive. The members of the Homeland Security Advisory Council—people like the U.S. Attorney General, the FBI chief, the CIA director, the Defense Secretary and the Secretary of State—were authorized to change the threat level.

Green (“Low”) and blue (“Guarded”) were never used. Why bother encouraging people to feel safe when you have such a useful tool to keep them on edge? And what if there is a terrorist attack—how will you explain why your threat level was anything less than yellow (“Elevated”)?

With yellow treated as the default, the threat level was raised to orange (“High”) five times in the first two years. Each of these so-called “orange alerts” lasted an average of 19 days. The public was supposedly being warned of imminent terrorist attack, but the nature of the threat was never specified, so it wasn’t much of a warning. (Will a terrorist crawl out of my breakfast cereal box?) This was a low-information system.

Subsequent orange alerts were slightly more specific: