The Mystery of How Twitter Verifies Celebrity Accounts

If you can believe it, Charlie Sheen has only been dripping his tiger blood on Twitter for seven days. As Sheen is happy to point out, his foray into the social networking platform landed him in the Guinness Book of World Records for fastest Twitter user to one million followers. Something that helped with his "record" was that Sheen almost immediately received verification by Twitter, to let fans know that it was really him. Which begs the question: How do celebrities get their accounts verified?

Good question, self! As The Wall Street Journal found out, Twitter doesn't actually care to reveal that information. "[W]e continue to very selectively verify accounts most at risk for impersonation on a one-off and highly irregular basis," reps for Twitter wrote to WSJ in an e-mail.

Which is a nice way of not answering a direct question. Based on the smattering of celebs that the Journal spoke with, though, the service -- which provides verified accounts with a blue check mark -- seems arbitrary at best. Dane Cook said he "hit a few 100,000 followers and one day it was just verified"; Britney Spears' manager petitioned Twitter for the verification; and Sheen, well, who knows? He probably threatened to cut the Fail Whale in half with a samurai sword or something.

· How Does Twitter Verify Celebrity Accounts? [WSJ]