X continues to tinker with ID verification, with new code in the app now pointing to the coming addition of verification elements.

X is looking to add a new element to its account details pop-up which would confirm whether an account has verified its ID.

X is also looking to add a new screen outlining its ID confirmation requirements (via Nima Owji).
Users would be required to provide both a current selfie and their government-issued ID, with X supposedly planning to outsource its ID confirmation to a firm called au10tix.

That would enable X to better confirm the identities of users at scale because checking the documentation of 250 million people is quite a task, and X simply doesn't have the internal capacity to do this alone.

LinkedIn is following in those footsteps with their new ID verification features but a potential drawback to that is that each site will likely require the work of separate regional partners to outsource that checking to. LinkedIn is currently only offering ID verification in very limited capacity in the US, and is expanding the program to add more providers to verify that information down the line.

X is likely to hold similar constraints, but might still be an important step, if only because, like X, it keeps free access restricted to only those who've verified their ID when signing up for X Premium (or formerly Twitter Blue).

But that does seem to be the direction in which it's going, by the language in this teaser:
That would enrage at least some users, but it might be a big step toward rooting out spammers and spambots, as well as clarifying the identities of X users.

Really, ID verification is the key measure to combat spammers and scammers in social apps. The main problem, as noted, is that actually verifying people’s identification documents takes time, and with millions, even billions of users in some cases, the apps themselves simply don’t have the capacity to verify such at scale.

But if there were ways to check each users' ID and to cross-check effectively to prevent impersonation, many of these problems would be fixed.

This was the originally-stated focus of X's X Premium project — Elon Musk explaining that his main aim with paid verification is to "authenticate all real humans.
In the months leading up to purchasing Twitter, Musk had been very vocal about his efforts to fight the bots, even suggesting that the previous management of Twitter had known they were intentionally misleading people about the number of fake profiles within the app in order to inflate its market value. In fact, Musk said the platform was saturated by bot accounts, up to 20% of all of Twitter's listed active users actually being fakes (Twitter has repeatedly reported that 5% of profiles in the app are fake).

Since taking ownership of the app, however, Musk has made little mention of the specific numbers, while also claiming to have defeated bots through newly implemented policies.
Which may or may not be true. X is no longer a publicly listed company, so it's not under any obligation to provide the same level of detail in reports on its user activity.

But if X was genuinely interested in ridding the world of these counterfeits, then ID verification would be one means to that end, although this would bring on a whole set of additional complexities that could cut across much of what X hopes to achieve.

For one, many users prefer to remain anonymous, which would no longer be possible if they had to share their ID info. That would spook many X users, which is likely the reason why it's also trying to reassure people that this won't be a requirement as such with this new element.

Many people also have more than one unrelated account, and the introduction of ID verification could affect this, because it would limit how many profiles a particular individual could run.

Or it would hurt X's user numbers. For example, if X were to discover that half of its 250 million users were actually running two accounts each on average, that could impact its ad reach figures, as it then would technically have to list them as a single exposure rather than multiple views.

All of these are things that X could overcome, in order to facilitate a form of ID verification. But broad scale linkage of government ID documents to accounts is not as easy as it may initially appear.

That's why X has thus far opted for what it calls "payment verification" instead, i.e. if a user has a bank account, and is willing to pay $8 per month, then we trust that this is an actual human, as bots won't pay and bot farmers can't afford to run thousands of accounts a month under this system.

That would also work if X Premium proved to be hugely popular. Musk's original intention was that most X users would simply pay, and that in itself would go a long way toward squelching such complaints, but to date, only about 0.5% of X users are paying for a blue tick.

Conceptually, you can see where Elon was going with this. People really want a blue checkmark, so we'll sell it to them, and when the majority of people have signed up, that'll make bot profiles stand out (as they'll be the only ones not verified), while it'll also solve X's revenue problems, by introducing a new income stream, and reduce its reliance on ads, making it less beholden to restrictions on speech.

All makes sense from a high vantage point, but in reality very few see any reason to pay for the app, while selling checkmarks and removing them from celebrities has also devalued this as a product, which it never should have been anyway.

A colored checkmark would have been a better alternative, especially for those who are paying users or have confirmed their IDs. For that matter, free ID confirmation would also be more effective than the present mode, though this will not help X to regain its business.

Bottom line: X should have introduced ID verification since day one of Elon's tenure, which would be the strongest play in the war on bots in the app, but if you want people to pay you're going to need a better value proposition.

On paper, the original X Premium makes a lot of sense. It's just been utterly ineffective as a means of achieving any of its stated goals.

Maybe, ID verification will go some way towards correcting this, at least in one respect.

UPDATE: Despite this project, Elon himself maintains that subscription is the only viable pathway to defeating bots. And as noted, it does make sense, in terms of charging a relatively small amount to price scammers out of the market, while also facilitating at least some form of verification. But figuring out the right price is hard, since you know that cost-of-living variances by region will be in play, and if you're not offering much of anything for that extra cost, most people simply won't pay. Unless you make them, by locking out nonpaying users. And when your main income is ad dollars, and thus, your key selling point is audience reach, that's also not an option.