The history of the blue check mark on Twitter is complex. The social media company came up with the idea after Major League Baseball manager and Hall of Fame inductee Tony La Russa sued the company back in 2009 over a fake account that pretended to be Tony La Russa. There were two problems facing the growing social media platform at the time: First, nobody wants to be sued, and potentially sued a lot—even if there is no merit to the case. Second, some of the cachet that Twitter offered was a platform where celebrities from all walks of life could directly communicate with fans and friends (in 140-character blurbs).
The verification system with the blue checkmarks, for all of its issues, was a legal and a business decision that allowed Twitter to become a place where reporters and athletes and actors and politicians could reach an audience directly-ish. Having high-profile subscribers you can believe are actually those people is a large part of establishing Twitter as an authentic space in the public sphere. But Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, decided against all the better judgement in the world that he would apply the exploitative ideology he has employed to make himself very wealthy, to Twitter.
To that end, he decided to get rid of the labor force Twitter had previously paid to moderate bad actors on the site that may hurt the branding. In Elon’s very narrow world view, users are consumers and should pay accordingly. Users should be able to police bad actors themselves while he simply pulls in profits.* The problem, of course, is that Twitter is a portal to content and communication where its users are the content and the communication.
Anyway, Elon Musk’s plan to turn “verification” into a paid subscription, thus nullifying what the word “verification” once meant, has gone exactly as well as everybody expected.
*I realize there are no profits for the guy who got too high on his own supply to understand what he was spending $44 billion on in the first place.
Very quickly, people set up “parody” accounts impersonating everything from politicians to companies to Elon Musk himself, and have been able to do this for the low price of $8. But to sharpen the point that people like Elon Musk aren’t really very good at business, just getting government contracts and subsidies and self-promoting to get people to believe they alone create wealth, most people signing up for the $8-per-month subscription in order to create parody accounts can very quickly cancel their credit card and get refunded after Twitter shuts down their account (because that has been happening and those charges are usually reversible if the service is closed to you before the first 30 days).
So let’s see how things have gone. Warning: There are some very off-color jokes at points below.
First, a sitting senator, a person whose verified account can give information about real legislation that effects all of our lives, gets impersonated.
And while this account didn’t seem to get much out into the world, some others have been very effective at driving home the point that Elon Musk’s ideas are crap. And many more have been able to make this point while also dropping a little left-wing truth-telling in the process.
Maybe this isn’t transphobe masculinity fetishist Matt Walsh?
You can read the evolution of transphobe dunderhead Walsh’s experience getting everything he ever wanted from Elon Musk.
That’s good news.
Maybe I can get a visualization of what the problem is.
How about Musk’s other job?
There’s more to that.
No worries, there are other major companies that Elon needs as advertisers on Twitter in order to stay away from filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
That can’t be good!
Oh good. It sounds like everything is going just fine.
Maybe not so good? Here’s one that would be wonderful if it were real, but does show how problematic this could be for Big Lie election deniers.
This one goes a little blue (fair warning).
How about a deep cut of John Carpenter movie humor?
I’m sure corporate advertisers will continue to flock to the site.
Here’s a quick summary of Elon’s thinking on the matter.
Early on Tuesday morning it was reported that Twitter’s internal channels were ablaze with talk of ending the Twitter Blue bleeding.
How’s the investment in Elon Musk’s purchase going? Let’s ask Friday morning’s Bloomberg news.
Wall Street banks that lent $13 billion to help fund Elon Musk’s buyout of Twitter Inc. have been quietly sounding out hedge funds and other asset managers for their interest in a chunk of the buyout debt at deeply discounted prices.
Some funds have offered to take a piece of the loan package at a discount as low as 60 cents on the dollar, which would be among the steepest markdowns in a decade. The banks have so far deemed those bids unattractive, according to people with knowledge of the discussions who asked not to be identified because the talks were private.
I’m no billionaire genius but I do understand fifth-grade math, and I’m thinking that “60 cents on the dollar” is not a great return on investment.
And finally.
Daily Kos is the largest progressive organization online, but we don't have billionaire backers. We rely on readers like YOU. Chip in $5 to help us keep fighting for progressive values.
Election night 2022 was full of surprises—mostly for people pushing the last couple months’ worth of traditional media narrative of a "red tsunami." The problem is that Americans are not super into the GOP. Markos and Kerry have been saying the media narrative was wrong for months, and on Tuesday, Daily Kos and The Brief team was validated. Time to celebrate!