The Times, the DogeCoin, and the Blue Bird: Twitter Users’ Unexpected Discontent. The New York Times’s “Blue Check Purge”
“That’s the reason that the verification program was created, so that it would be extremely difficult for people to do that because all the blue checked accounts they say they are are actually not,” Messing said.
The New York Times is thought to have lost its verification. Musk replied, “Oh ok, we’ll take it off then!” after reading a meme about the newspaper refusing to pay.
After an account that often engages with Musk posted a meme this weekend about the Times declining to pay for verification, Musk responded in a tweet saying, “Oh ok, we’ll take it off then.” Musk then lashed out at the Times — just the latest instance of the billionaire slamming journalists or media outlets — in a series of tweets that claimed the outlet’s coverage is boring and “propaganda.”
The weekend moves are just the latest example of Twitter creating confusion and whiplash for users over feature changes — and in this case, not just any users, but many of the most high-profile accounts that have long been a key selling point for the platform. It also shows how much Musk tends to guide decisions about the platform by his own instincts than by policy.
In a separate puzzling move, Twitter’s blue bird logo at the top of the site was replaced on Monday with doge, the meme representing the cryptocurrency dogecoin, which Musk has promoted. The price of dogecoin shot up 20% on Monday.
If you pay for the whole year at once, you can get a subscription that costs $8 per month or $84 for the whole year.
In the days leading up to the blue check purge that wasn’t, prominent users such as actor William Shatner and anti-bullying activist Monica Lewinksy pushed back against the idea that, as power users that draw attention to the site, they should have to pay for a feature that keeps them safe from impersonation.
By muddying the reason accounts are verified, the new label could risk making it easier for people to scam or impersonate high-profile users. Over the past year, Musk has been raising doubts about whether reserve verification for paid users will help reduce the number of bots on the site.
Last week he said that there shouldn’t be a different standard for celebrities. Musk is on the hook for a lot of debt because of his purchase of Twitter, and the paid feature could help him.
Users who follow verified accounts will only be recommended verified accounts in their “For You” feeds by April 15, according to Musk.
Twitter had previously given the badges to celebrities, politicians and other notable organizations or people for free as a way to distinguish their accounts from those who sought to imitate them and to show their identities had been confirmed. That helped the service because celebrities and politicians were more likely to use it than the average person.
The Federal Trade Commission rebuffed Musk when he tried to talk to the agency about the inquiry into privacy and data practices of popular social network, documents show.
Musk said Twitter is now worth about $20 billion , according to an email he sent to employees, a significant drop from the $44 billion that he paid to buy the company in October.
The research associate professor at New York University told NPR that users could exploit the paid service to gain a larger following and drown out higher-quality information.
A user with a blue check pretended to be Eli Lilly to send a message on their behalf about how they were offering free diabetes care for a year. The company denied the news and apologized, but not before the fake tweet received a ton of likes and retweets and made Lilly’s stock price go down.
The checkmark was originally used to verify users. The proliferation of hoaxes during Hurricane Sandy was part of the impetus for creating it; misinformation and impersonation were so normal in the early days of the social media platform that the remnants can be seen in the former president’s handle: @realDonaldTrump.
This matters because reporters live-tweet breaking news. If you wanted to know what my notes looked like for, variously, Musk’s defamation trial, Epic Games v. Apple, or Elizabeth Holmes’ fraud trial, you just had to follow my Twitter account; I was posting my impressions in real time before writing up the day in review for this site. The blue checkmark next to my name gave readers some measure of confidence I wasn’t the kind of person that might blithely make stuff up.
Musk seized on the idea of the checkmark being a status symbol. He offered it for sale. He charged for it, which he did not like. The checkmark was meant to prevent this kind of thing, but it didn’t work out the first time. But there was another problem. Identifying who paid to get the checkmark immediately marked them as lower in status than the legacy checks.
The basic truth of cool, as anyone can tell you, is that trying to be cool is not cool, and paying to be cool is for suckers. Come April 15th, Musk has said that the For You page will be paid Twitter Blue users only — which means it’ll be full of marketers, newsletter writers, and other desperate content shills essentially ruining the feed. That is, assuming it happens. This is an Elon Musk company; he might change his mind.
There is a world in which Twitter Blue is a product that makes sense, but Musk would have to return it to its origins as a service. If paying for Twitter meant a better user experience — the ability to use TweetDeck or Tweetbot, encrypted DMs, or priority service on spam, hacking, and harassment — it might make sense for LeBron James and grubby bloggers like me to purchase it. Is it a status symbol? A girl, please.
Musk’s reputation — his cool factor, if you will — was part of what sold Teslas. Except now we are all watching him with a social network of his own. It’s increasingly obvious that Musk’s less a real-life Tony Stark and more of a cranky Boomer who spends too much time looking at memes while his businesses are on fire. That has implications not just for Twitter but for his other companies, too. Tesla shares are down almost 50 percent over the last 12 months.
Perhaps Musk’s mistake is understandable because of his success in the business world. Money was cool for him. That is something that makes the mess so funny. Being exposed as bad at business? Not so much a genius? That’s the kind of reputational damage Musk can’t buy his way out of.