Daily Marketing News, October 12, 2026: X verifies suspicious accounts by face
X has started locking suspicious accounts until the owner shows their face to the camera or puts a finger on the phone's sensor. Meanwhile Search Console has been showing stale numbers for more than 64 hours, and US courts are sorting out whether you can train AI on YouTube videos and on other people's selfies.
Story of the day: X locks flagged accounts until a person verifies with their face
On October 12, 2026, MediaPost reported that X, Elon Musk's social network formerly known as Twitter, is stepping up its fight against spam bots. If the system spots unusual or automated looking activity on an account, it will demand proof that a real person is running it. You can't decline the check and carry on. Accounts in good standing won't be asked. It only goes to accounts the system has flagged.
There are 3 ways to verify. The first is device biometrics: Face ID, Touch ID or biometric unlock on Android. The second is a short selfie video showing your face. The third, a hand gesture in front of the camera, is still marked "coming soon". Which options you get may depend on your device, app version and region. Before this, according to X's help pages, locked accounts were verified by phone or email. Anyone with access to the inbox can type in a code from an email. This one needs a person holding the phone.
Until the account passes, it can't publish posts, follow other accounts or send direct messages. Once it passes, full access comes back, and X says that takes a few seconds. The seconds have nothing to do with it. The whole account stops, and it stays stopped for exactly as long as it takes the owner to get to their phone: an hour, an evening, a week of vacation.
First in the line of fire are accounts run through scheduling tools, accounts that follow people in bulk and accounts managed from several regions. That's a normal day at an SMM agency: posts go out on schedule from a tool, the manager sits in one city, the client in another. To X's system, that is exactly what automated looking activity is. If an account like that gets flagged on launch day, you get an empty feed instead of posts and silence instead of replies in direct messages.
If an account is managed through third party tools, link it to the owner's phone ahead of time and agree on who passes the check and how fast. Do it before an important launch, not in the middle of a lockout. If the owner isn't willing to show their face to a camera, that's an answer too: don't run important campaigns on that account without someone reachable.
More news for October 12, 2026
Search Console is Google's free dashboard for site owners, showing clicks, impressions and positions in search. The report usually updates within a few hours, but over the last few days, following a Google spam update, it has fallen behind. Search Engine Roundtable took a screenshot around 7:00 a.m. US Eastern time on Sunday, October 11. The last delay this long was in December 2025. Google hasn't commented on this one yet, but during past outages it explained that they affected only the reports, not crawling, indexing or ranking. A dip on the chart over the last few days doesn't mean traffic fell. Check weekly client reports against your site analytics and mention the delay in them directly.
US federal judge Richard Seeborg issued the ruling on Friday. The suit was filed in April by Ted Entertainment, the company behind the h3h3 Productions channels, and Matt Fisher, creator of the golf channel MrShortGame Golf. They say Apple violated the DMCA, the US copyright law, by getting around YouTube's download protection. Apple asked for the case to be dismissed: videos on YouTube are publicly available, so there was nothing to get around. The judge disagreed. Reports in April said the suit covers 438 Ted Entertainment videos, 8 MrShortGame Golf videos and 62 videos from the Golfholics channel. For creators, this is a signal: a platform's download protection could become grounds for claims against those who train AI on their videos.
The defendants are SpaceXAI Corp. and SpaceXAI LLC, which own and develop Grok. The plaintiff, Cesar Padilla, uploaded a selfie to Grok to get a professional headshot, and he claims the companies illegally scanned facial geometry in photos people uploaded for editing. The case was filed in federal court for the Northern District of Illinois. The state has a biometric privacy law, BIPA: companies must disclose their biometric data policies and get written consent from residents before collecting data. The law allows damages of up to $5,000 per violation. If you make avatars, headshots or visuals for clients from their photos using AI tools, read how the service stores uploaded faces and get written consent from the people in the photos.
What to do about it: creators, advertisers, site owners
- If you manage other people's X accounts through scheduling tools: agree with the owner that they'll pass the check quickly with Face ID, a fingerprint or a selfie video. Without that, a flagged account can't publish posts or reply to direct messages.
- Site owners: don't draw conclusions about a traffic drop from the last few days of Search Console data. Until the report catches up, check against your site analytics and warn clients about the delay in weekly reports.
- YouTube creators and the people who promote them: keep an eye on the case against Apple. It could shape how creators protect their videos from being used to train AI.
- If you make visuals from client photos with AI tools: before uploading, read the service's rules on storing biometric data and get written consent from the people in the photos.
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