Twitter has a strange, hot-and-cold policy to the suspension of what they refer to as ‘impersonator’ accounts, and which the rest of the world refers to as fakes.

You may recall the suspension of the Christopher Walken spoof account in March 2009. At the time, the profile was nearing 100,000 fans, which was a big deal a year ago, and was enormously popular, picking up a ton of retweets and mentions and also getting some attention in the mainstream press. However, the parody breached Twitter’s TOS regarding impersonation and was removed with no warning or fanfare, at least not from Twitter themselves.

That’s fine – that’s their rule, after all – but the problem is, much like anything else that falls under official Twitter policy, they seem to thrive on an attitude of ‘one rule for one’.

The (clearly) fake Michael Jordan account is a prime example. I mean, it’s a hoot, but it’s not real, and yet Twitter seems not to care about it one little bit.

Not only does that account have almost 75,000 followers, but it’s got the right username, too – @michaeljordan – and I can’t begin to imagine why Michael Jordan himself doesn’t do something about it. Or, for that matter, any of the many other representatives of the multi-billion dollar franchise that Jordan’s name represents.

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Justin Bieber has been trending on Twitter all week.

I don’t know who Justin Bieber is. So I looked him up. Now, I know who Justin Bieber is, but I still don’t care. He might be a great guy, and he might be super-popular, but he’s of zero interest to me and seeing him featured permanently in trending topics is not only irrelevant, but increasingly irritating.

I want to roll my mouse over to trending topics, and see a little X appear next to Justin’s name. And when I click on it, I want Twitter to say, “Okay, Justin Bieber will no longer appear in trending topics for you.”

I want to, but I can’t. Really, Twitter, is that too much to ask?

I can make all the observations I want about how the top celebrity accounts on Twitter aren’t really all that much, but here’s the real killer: we can snuff them out any time we like.

Don’t worry Ashton: I don’t mean in the Mafia sense. And I’m also definitely not talking about the royal ‘we’, either. I’m talking about us. You, me, and everybody else.

I’m talking about the collective.

If we, as a unit, all decided to unfollow Ashton Kutcher on Twitter, there would be no more Ashton Kutcher on Twitter. Sure, he’d still have his spammers and his no-tweet wonders, and that and a token will get him on the subway.

Likewise, if we did the exact same thing to all the celebrities in Twitter’s top one per cent, then all those celebrities would move to Twitter’s bottom one per cent. Like magic.

Heck, if we, the collective, the team, decided to all block Biz Stone at once, I think Twitter would be forced to investigate exactly what was going on there. And they might even ask him to step down. I mean, if somebody who co-runs Twitter is that unpopular, then somebody else will need to make an executive decision. After all, there will be shareholders to consider, soon enough.

And if everybody unfollowed everybody else, and we then deleted each and every tweet we’d ever made, there would be no Twitter. Just a blank, empty space, where nobody knew (or cared) what was happening. Ever.

Here’s the thing: if enough of you don’t like something on any social network – or, for that matter, the world – then all it really takes is for you to rally the troops. Do it through a hashtag. Get some power-bloggers involved. Get your MP involved. Get Ashton himself involved. (Although don’t bother with Kim Kardashian – she’s far too expensive.)

Granted, it takes some work, and it takes some dedication, but that doesn’t mean it cannot happen. Be creative. Go crazy. And make it count. It’s amazing how quickly that ‘you’ can become an ‘us’.

Twitter’s Suggested Users List (SUL) was a controversial and in my opinion poorly-implemented feature that provided newcomers to the platform with a selection of recommendations for them to follow when they first signed up. The idea of introducing first-time users to the concept of following was a good one; where the SUL failed was in gifting a privileged few hundreds of thousands of free followers which were then easily translated into a significant increase in status, web traffic and (by default) advertising revenue.

Yesterday on their official blog, Twitter announced the launch of Suggestions, which they are touting as a superior replacement for the SUL.

In his pitch for Suggestions, Twitter product manager Josh Elman writes:

“We’ve found that the power of suggestion can be a great thing to help people get started, but it’s important that we suggest things relevant to them. We’ve created a number of algorithms to identify users across a variety of clusters who tweet actively and are engaged with their audiences. These new algorithms help us group these active users into lists of users by interests. Rather than suggesting a random set of 20 users for a new user to follow, now we let users browse into the areas they are interested in and choose who they want to follow from these lists. These lists will be refreshed frequently as the algorithms identify new users who should be suggested in these lists and some that are not as engaging to new users will be removed.”

Which is all well and good. Except, when you look at it closely, and with one exception, it’s really just the same SUL it always was. The only major difference is the same suggested users we had previously have now been categorised.

Browse the Suggestions page here. The first tab (‘Browse Suggestions’) is where you’ll find the SUL, except they’ve now made things easier for you by tagging everybody in one of twenty different categories.

(New users see this.)

So, for example, when you click on Entertainment, you’ll see a list of the same celebrities and entertainment brands that have always been on the suggested user list.

Likewise for all the other nineteen categories, too, which includes Staff Picks and Staff Picks For Haiti. Elman writes that these differ from the other categories in that those listed inside are manually selected, but as you would expect, it’s not quite clear how these entries are determined. Highlighting a good cause is a nice idea, but Twitter’s lack of transparency in everything it does is becoming a little tiresome.

What is curious is how some of these people are verified users, and some are not. There’s always been a clear USA-bias towards the verification of accounts on Twitter, but why Anthony Edwards gets the stamp of approval and Roger Ebert does not, yet both qualify as recommendations, is something only God/Biz Stone knows.

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I’ve written previously on this blog about why I feel that the option to ‘get verified’ should be available to all users on Twitter. I’ve also made it clear that I believe that, with some exceptions, anonymity on the internet needs to end.

On Tuesday, Bill Gates finally joined Twitter, and was almost immediately verified by @caroline. That’s fine and to be expected – like him or loathe him, Bill Gates is a big deal, and with parodies and impostors still common on Twitter (including Gates himself, who has made several illegitimate appearances) it makes sense to verify the very famous very quickly.

Certainly, common or garden Twitter proles such as you and I shouldn’t expect this kind of first-class treatment from Biz Stone at al. But picking up from what I said previously, those of us who wish to be taken seriously on Twitter – and, indeed, the internet – should expect to (eventually) be provided with a way to confirm that our account is genuine. That, yes, we are a real person, we are who we say we are, and we’re prepared to be fully accountable for the things that we say.

It’s all about legitimacy.

It’s easier to verify a celebrity than it is a regular person. Celebrities have agents and managers, and lots of people who can vouch for them, including other celebrities. Regular people don’t have those luxuries, but that doesn’t mean we don’t deserve the same rights.

What I’d like to see on Twitter – and down the line, across the entire internet – is a way for each and every one of us to get verified. If you use Paypal, you’ll know that becoming verified on Paypal is an important part of the process. It helps to build trust within the Paypal community, and provides an element of safety to others when they are engaging in transactions with you. Paypal, as the middleman, provides that guarantee.

I want to see this on Twitter. It may have to be an entirely different system to the current verification process (which, let’s face it, was tailor-made for celebrities and brands), but there needs to be a way for me to ID myself with Twitter and get my account authorised.

One easy way to do this would be to implement verification as a step in Twitter’s widely-anticipated premium account business model. By paying for Twitter, you’re already making the decision that the network is important to you, and likely using it as a business tool yourself, so getting verified, and making yourself legitimate, is absolutely worth its weight.

Using Paypal’s example as a guide, Twitter could easily ID check your account by matching up your bank account or credit card with your profile. And once done, once you’ve been verified, you get the seal of approval, and the trust and safety it provides to others.

And it doesn’t matter if you share the same name with somebody else on Twitter, or a hundred different people. Twitter isn’t verifying your name – they’re verifying your identity. They’re saying to everybody who visits your profile and interacts with you that this is a real person, and more importantly, that they’re exactly who they say they are.

Anyone who wishes to remain anonymous or doesn’t feel that becoming verified is important to them would simply opt out of the process. None of this would be forced. It would simply be available as a facility for those that desired legitimacy. Of course, it would be impossible for bots and most spammers to get verified, and it’s unlikely that trolls, stalkers and good old-fashioned weirdos would take the risk, so while the option to remain unverified would always (and would have to) be available, you would do so knowing the consequences, inasmuch as who you are grouping yourself with.

Furthermore, if Twitter really wants to fashion itself as part of your online identity, accurate verification on Twitter could very easily lead to accurate verification everywhere else, too.

This is coming. If it isn’t started by Twitter, it’ll be started by Facebook. And once the push towards online legitimacy begins, it’ll be impossible to stop. And for this Twitterer, it cannot come fast enough.