The social network has adopted a new font. On the web version of Twitter, usernames now display differently to prevent confusion between two characters.
It is no longer possible to confuse two characters on Twitter. At least within a username. Since January 26, the company has changed the font of the account tag (the identifier starting with an “@”). For now, this change has only been observed on the web version of the social network.
The change could have gone unnoticed. As the point The Vergethe account Twitter Support did not mention the subject. Yet it is through this that many announcements on additions or modifications of functions and use are made.
Too many similarities
It was directly the users who highlighted the new font. Concretely, the letters “l” now have a rounding on their lower part and the numbers “0” are crossed out. These seemingly innocuous changes will help avoid excessive similarities between the characters.
The similarities between lowercase “l” and uppercase “i” or uppercase “o” and the numbers “0” had given Twitter’s moderation a few cold sweats – since hard hit by layoffs. On November 10, when Elon Musk made the paid certification available for the first time, numerous impersonations were committed thanks to these hard-to-distinguish characters.
Since this episode, the platform has reviewed its policy around its Twitter Blue subscription. Elon Musk had assured that to avoid this kind of problem, a manual verification of all accounts would be done before giving them the blue certification badge.
For the moment, Twitter has not provided any information suggesting that the font of usernames will also be changed on the social network’s applications.
