Verified Accounts are supposed to let you know what Twitter accounts are authentic and which ones are fake. You’ve no doubt seen them scattered around the Twitter-verse: Barack Obama, Lady Gaga and Gary Vaynerchuk are all Verified members. Want to see the list of all the accounts that have been Verified by Twitter? We’ve got it right here.

Verified Accounts was a beta experiment back in the summer of 2009 that was officially phased out by September 2010 according to TheNextWeb. While Twitter has said they’re working on a system to replace Verified Accounts (and many are hoping this will be automated rather than manual like its predecessor), those who received a Verified Account badge still get to keep it.

The purpose of Verified Accounts is “…to limit user confusion by making it easier to identify authentic accounts on Twitter,” so they’re still relevant to the Twitter ecosystem. It’s important to know whether a Tweet is coming from Barack Obama (or, more likely, one of his aides), or an impostor.

Now for the list. If you want to take a look at every account ever verified on Twitter, all you have to do is follow the Verified bot at Verified Accounts (@VeRiFiEd). This is the official Twitter bot that collects all of the Verified Accounts on the network, listing a grand total of 16,643 at the time of writing. To see all of these accounts, you simply have to take a look at who the bot is following.

While account verification is officially shut down for now (although new accounts are still getting verified on a case-by-case basis), we can reasonably expect the program to be reinstated in a big way sometime soon. And until then, Twitter recommends that you link your Twitter account to your official website to confirm your identity for your followers.