I must confess to being extremely confused as to what Elon Musk is trying to achieve with his revamped system of “blue checks” on Twitter. As far as I can see, Musk has taken a system that was, indeed, badly broken, and simply broken it in another way.
The initial purpose of the blue-check system was to affirm that a given Twitter user was, in fact, who that user said he was, and thereby to avoid impersonation online. In theory, this system should have (1) been available to everyone, and (2) been entirely neutral in its application. But it wasn’t, and people correctly complained about that. In practice, only well-connected people could be verified — which created a sort of class system on Twitter — and, worse still, Twitter sometimes conditioned maintenance of the blue check on good behavior. A famous example of this came in 2016, when the site “unverified” Milo Yiannopoulos for violating its terms of service — which, given that the blue check was supposed to confirm that Yiannopoulos was who he said he was, and not to confer a moral endorsement, made no sense.
When Musk first started talking about buying Twitter, he suggested that he would like to verify every single human Twitter user in the world. Whether practical or not, this made total sense as an aim, because the purpose of verification is . . . well, verification. When Musk took over Twitter last month, he seemed to be continuing down this road when he complained that Twitter’s present verification system reminded him of “lords and peasants.”
But then, he . . . well, he did nothing of the sort. Twitter’s new approach is to offer users the opportunity to pay $8/month for a service called Twitter Blue, which, among other things, will accord an automatic blue check to its subscribers. From a business perspective, this is understandable: Twitter needs to make a profit, and this is a way of quickly injecting cash. But, outside of that, it makes no sense at all. Twitter’s website confirms that “all accounts subscribed to Twitter Blue on iOS on or after November 9, 2022 will automatically receive a blue checkmark, which will persist for the duration of the subscribers’ subscription term.” In other words — and I’ve confirmed this personally — there is no verification process at all. Obviously, this completely undermines the purpose of a verification badge, which is to confirm that a user actually is who he says he is, and, obviously, it does nothing to solve the two-tier “lords and peasants” problem, because it costs far more ($96/year) than most people will be willing or able to pay.
The results of this have been predictable. Already, people are paying the $8, getting their blue check, and then immediately impersonating other people online. And, because the symbol on the accounts that are doing the impersonating is associated with verification — and still used for that purpose! — this has started to cause chaos. Impersonation is against the terms of service, so a lot of the people who are engaged in it will eventually be removed (and lose their money). But that will take time, and, when the impersonation is aimed at someone less famous than Elon Musk or Tony Blair or Rudy Giuliani, it may well go unnoticed for a while — especially given that Twitter has substantially cut down its number of staff. Will it be worth it to some people to pay $8 to troll minor public figures, or their ex-wife? I suspect it will, yes.
Which is all to say that, far from altering or fixing what he perceived to be the problem — namely, that the blue-check system had drifted from its original purpose and become a capriciously awarded and maintained status symbol — Musk has now reinforced it. It made no sense, on pre-Musk Twitter, to hand verification symbols only to prominent people of whom Twitter’s owners approved. And it makes no sense, on Musk’s Twitter, to hand verification symbols to people who haven’t actually been verified. That’s not a fix, it’s revenge, and, while it may feel good in the moment, it is probably not going to help Musk achieve the lofty and admirable goals that he talked about before he was handed the keys to the kingdom.