The Blue Check System: Why Facebook, TwitterBlue, and TikTok Cribbed the Blue Bates for their Social Networks, but Not Their Own

The service comes with features that even people that don’t really care about verification might find attractive, such as the ability to add friends, and the integration of a checkmark. It lets you post longer videos and tweets or edit mistakes out of your existing posts. The company will prioritize your posts over other people’s and will cut down on the number of ads you see, though those features aren’t available yet.

The paid verification feature’s rocky rollout attracted widespread criticism from misinformation experts who had warned it would make identifying trustworthy information much more difficult, particularly in the critical period following the US midterm elections. Even some of Musk’s fellow high-powered users of the platform had tough feedback.

Musk was reported to have told his employees that they would do everything in their power to adhere to the FTC consent decree.

It is part of the effort of the new owner of Musk’s company to grow its subscription business and bolster its bottom line that a new verification system was updated with multiple new colors.

Musk made an effort to get out of the deal after he found out about the spread of fake accounts on the social media site.

Lock in your name, photo, and email before signing up for Twitter Blue if you want to keep your check mark. According to the site’s FAQ page, the site may remove your check mark for a brief period of time if any of this information on your profile is changed. Musk dislikes accounts that impersonate him on the platform he now owns.

The blue check system was not a panacea for fake news or for fraud, but it did help the platform function as it should have. There’s a reason why every other major social platform, including Facebook and TikTok, cribbed the blue badges for their own networks. They have been at least moderately helpful.

Jerome Powell’s Fed hikes and stock prices are too late: a few words on the Fed hiking regime that threatened inflation, and why investors should not speculate

A version of this story first appeared in CNN Business’ The Bell newsletter was published before that. Is that not a subscriber? You can sign up right here. You can listen to an audio version of the newsletter by clicking the same link.

The Federal Reserve is holding a meeting in December. Fed officials say they will be using hard economic data to make their next decision, but analyst can speculate all they want.

That means key housing, labor, and inflation reports will likely have outsized effects on the market as investors speculate about what they might mean for the future of interest rates.

What’s happening: No one can move markets like Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell — with just a few words on Wednesday he crushed investors’ hopes of an interest rate pivot and sent stocks plunging. “We have a ways to go,” said Powell of the Fed’s current hiking regime meant to fight persistent inflation. “It’s very premature, in my view, to think about or be talking about pausing.”

The central bank doesn’t think inflation will go down until next year. That will require more interest rate hikes in the coming months, warned policymakers.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html

Purchasing Consumer Goods and Services: Premarket Stocks Trading in the U.S. After 4 Years of Growth in Wage and Job Numbers

The government report is expected to show the economy added another 200,000 positions in October — down from last month, but still a very solid number as demand for employment continues to outpace the supply of labor.

That means more inflation. Businesses have to pay higher wages to attract and retain employees and can charge more for their services. The Fed will be looking closely at hourly wage growth in the report. Wages increased by 5% in September.

There is an chance that another jobs report will be published before the Fed meeting. Even if the unemployment rate is not historically low, the Fed can still be reassured if the reports show a downward trajectory in employment.

Core inflation, which excludes food and oil, rose 0.6% in September matching August’s pace and coming in well above expectations, not a good sign for the Fed. And analysts expect to see another large 0.5% increase in October.

PCE reflects changes in the prices of goods and services purchased by consumers in the United States. The Fed believes the measure is more accurate than CPI because it accounts for a wider range of purchases from a broader range of buyers.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html

The Wall Wall Walls: Employers, Trade Unions, and Wall Streets in a Depression-Induced Mortgage Market: Insights from the Wall Street Wall

Housing: The housing market has been deeply impacted by the Fed’s efforts to fight inflation, and is one of the first areas of the economy to show signs of cooling.

A decline in demand is caused by elevated borrowing costs and the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 6.95% last week.

“The housing market was very overheated for the couple of years after the pandemic as demand increased and rates were low,” said Powell on Wednesday. “We do understand that that’s really where a very big effect of our policies is.”

Thursday’s quarter of a percentage point increase in interest rates was the biggest hike in 33 years for the Bank of England.

But the bank also issued a stark warning. It said that economic output is already contracting and that it expects a recession to continue through the first half of 2024 “as high energy prices and materially tighter financial conditions weigh on spending.”

Several employees of the social media service filed a class action lawsuit against their former managers, accusing them of violating the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.

All badges will be suspended and the company offices will temporarily be closed to ensure the safety of employees and systems.

If a company with more than 100 workers plans to cut 50 jobs at a single site of employment, they must give 60 days’ written notice.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html

Twitter is no Hellscape: Elon Musk’s warning on impersonation without a verified name change could be permanently suspended in the next generation of social media

The company filing states that all previous members of Twitter’s board, including recently ousted CEO Parag Agrawal and chairman Bret Taylor, are no longer directors “in accordance with the terms of the merger agreement.” The filing states, that Musk is the only director of the social networking site.

The richest man in the world used an expletive to talk about the current system of lords and peasants who do not have blue checkmarks. He said that power should be with the people. Blue for $8/month.”

In the hours leading up to his purchase of the platform, Musk wrote a letter to advertisers explaining why he didn’t want the platform to become a free-for-all hellscape. That attempt at reassuring the advertising industry, which makes up the vast majority of the business, doesn’t seem to be working.

The decision to push back the new feature comes one day after the platform launched an updated version of its iOS app that promises to allow users who pay a monthly subscription fee to get a blue checkmark on their profiles, a feature that CEO Elon Musk has proposed as a way to fight spam on the platform.

On Sunday, Musk tweeted that, “Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying ‘parody’ will be permanently suspended.” He claimed a name change would cause a loss of verified checkmark.

Twitter Blue for Musk: A Social Media Controversy for Elon Musk and the Truth About Silicon Valley Angularity and Freedom of Speech

“I am a freedom of speech absolutist and I eat doody for breakfast every day,” Silverman tweeted Saturday. She supports Democratic candidates on her account.

A warning that there had been some odd activity from the account was displayed to visitors before they clicked through to the profile. The comedian renamed her account back to it’s usual form, complete with her own name and image.

Soon, the blue checkmark may become an even more glaring indicator of your subscription status — at the moment, having it means that you either pay for Blue or that you were verified through the legacy verification program, and it takes a few clicks to figure out which is the case. However, Twitter has said it’ll start getting rid of those come April. If that happens, the ambiguity will be gone — blue checks will mean Blue subscriptions.

After changing her profile name to Musk, Bertinelli tweeted and retweeted support for several Democratic candidates and hashtags, including “VoteBlueForDemocracy” and “#VoteBlueIn2022.”

On April fool’sday, the policy will be in effect, though there is a caveat. In addition to April 1 being known as a troll day, Musk was trolled when he lied about the financial condition of his electric vehicle company.

Musk has shared conspiracy theories in recent months which have included the attack on Paul Pelosi, a comparison of Joseph Stalin with Musk, and a warning that the woke mind virus will destroy civilization.

In the past week alone, one of the world’s most influential social networks has laid off half its workforce; alienated powerful advertisers; blown up key aspects of its product, then repeatedly launched and un-launched other features aimed at compensating for it; and witnessed an exodus of senior executives.

It is a stunning reversal of fortune not only for Musk, who bought the company for $44 billion but also for a platform used by world leaders, CEOs and the Pope.

Twitter Blue costs $11 a month for iOS and Android subscribers, part of owner Elon Musk’s attempt to raise its subscriptions business after buying the platform for $44 billion.

Bringing back Twitter curation after Musk announced a reversal of the gray badges for a customer service based on fake tweets

Hours after the gray badges launched on Wednesday as a way to help users differentiate legitimate celebrity and branded accounts from accounts that had merely paid for a blue check mark, Musk abruptly tweeted that he had “killed” the feature, forcing subordinates to explain the reversal.

“We’re not currently putting an ‘Official’ label on accounts but we are aggressively going after impersonation and deception,” Twitter’s verified support account tweeted on Wednesday evening.

“@elonmusk, from one entrepreneur to another, for when you have your customer service hat on. Mark Cuban is a billionaire who spent too much time muting all the newly acquired checkmark accounts in an attempt to make them useful again.

“Bottom line is that you have a decision to make,” Cuban added. The onus is on the users to use their free accounts to find and write about things that interest them. Or bring back Twitter curation. One makes it easier for the public to hear information on the Internet. The other is terrible.

The company faces billions of dollars in fines from the FTC for alleged privacy missteps dating to before Musk’s ownership. The employees of the company were warned by the employee that the company could find itself even more exposed after the resignation of the chief information security officer and chief privacy officer.

How Much Do You Need to Get There? Musk’s Promises to relaunch the Blue Membership Program at ATLANTIC with an App Store Feed

The company says that the new service will cost $8 a month on the web or $11 a month if purchased through an app on iPhone and iPads, where in-app transactions can be processed through the company’s App Store, which charges a 30% commission.

The new tiers follow comments by Musk about the “Apple tax,” a longstanding pain point for app developers that has been viewed as damaging to Apple’s rivals by many regulators around the world. Musk has since claimed his row with Apple was resolved following a meeting with the company’s chief executive, Tim Cook at the company’s Cupertino headquarters.

Musk says there will be three colors: gold for companies, grey for governments, and blue check for prominent individuals, including celebrities.

Even before Musk took over, the company’s advertising business was not as robust as it should have been, and it has struggled to grow its service the way larger competitors have.

Despite laying off more than half of its staff, there have been unanswered questions about whether the company still has the resources to tackle a task of this magnitude.

Rachel Tobac, the CEO of the cybersecurity firm SocialProof Security, previously toldNPR that it was not yet certain if it would be possible to prevent fraud with a reduced workforce. The scammer will determine how to overwhelm or manipulate the identity verification system to get “authenticATED” as an entity they are not.

When a person clicks on the blue check for an account that has been verified before, they are greeted with a note stating that it is a legacy verified account. It may or may not be notable.”

Musk has promised to make the Blue users more visible on the site. The company said that subscribers would get priority in replies, mentions, and search, a promise he made in November.

Musk initially said the relaunch of the new system would take place at the end of November, but it was delayed several times over concerns about the safety of the feature.

Why You Need to Be Verified? What You Should Know When You’re About to Sign Up For A Free Premium Account or How to Become a Member of Twitter

The additional gold and gray verification categories appear aimed at addressing some of those concerns, but it’s not clear what a requirement for individuals to pay to be verified would mean for trust in prominent individual users.

“All verified individual humans will have same blue check, as boundary of what constitutes ‘notable’ is otherwise too subjective,” Musk tweeted last month. If a person is verified to be a member of an org, they can show it with a tiny logo.

Not sure what you get for your monthly subscription? Are you trying to figure out what all these different colored check marks mean? There is everything you need to know.

The upgraded service will allow you to make aesthetic changes. The icon in your phone can be changed or you can change the app colors. For anyone who bookmarks an overwhelming assortment of Tweets, you can now sort through those bookmarked posts and organize them into private folders.

Twitter has also officially started rolling out a new gray checkmark badge for “government and multilateral accounts.” You might be able to see it already on the @WhiteHouse account. Gray badges would be rolled out by the company in November.

After everything, are you ever still sure you want to be on Twitter? Anyone wanting something new can browse WIRED articles that help them get started on Mastodon, discover new servers on Discord, or give LinkedIn a second chance.

The play is obvious. The company is trying to lean into making money through subscriptions, and creating what’s essentially an enterprise tier of its Twitter Blue service could help it do that. The company lists examples of the types of use cases it expects to see for Blue for Business: sports teams affiliating with their athletes, movie characters getting a logo next to their name, or journalists having a badge that shows they really do work for a specific outlet. (Though Twitter may have a hard time courting the press after some of its recent antics.)

Why does Musk Start promoting the Blue Badge? After Meta Announcement, Elon Musk Hasn’t Changed a Thing About Twitter

Some of the features started showing up before the announcement — we’ve already dug into the rounded-square profile pictures and affiliate badges, which started appearing earlier on Monday.

Mark Zuckerberg announced on Sunday that Meta was testing a subscription service that would allow people to pay to get verified.

To avoid fake accounts, customers who want to get the blue badge would need to provide a government ID which matches their profile name and picture. Users must also be above 18 to be eligible.

There will be no changes to accounts that have already been verified. For users who are noteworthy, verification used to be a requirement.

The bluebadge’s meaning is being changed to focus on authenticity so that it can be used more often. “We will display follower count in more places so people can distinguish which accounts are notable public figures among accounts that share the same name.”

On February 3rd, Elon Musk made a big announcement. You will need to be subscribed to the service to receive the revenue from ads that appear in reply threads. We here at the site were waiting for more information about the program, or for official support documents to explain how the program would work.

Even if you aren’t interested in social media he will still make an announcement with little to no follow-up. Remember when he had lied about having a content moderation council that would vet any major policy changes, but then tried to sell it again by voting for them instead of the council? We can’t tell if the feature exists due to a lack of follow up policy polls, but he said you would have to be aTwitter Blue subscriber to vote in policy polls.

Blue subscribers still receive new features since Musk took over. They can now upload 60-minute videos instead of being limited to 10 minutes, and they can write 4,000-character tweets.

Since November, CEO and owner Musk has been promising prioritized ranking to the benefit of the community. It hasn’t materialized even though Musk wants employees to work in “hardcore” conditions. The same is true for several of his other promises — in February, he announced that Twitter was starting to share ad revenue with Blue subscribers, something that hasn’t started happening over a month later, and he promised to open source the company’s algorithm on the week of February 27th. That didn’t happen, but he’s now promising that it will occur on March 31st.

Twitter: Why Elon Musk is a troll? An official announcement from Musk’s Twitter account on April 1st announces that it is accepting applications for grey checks

The company also announced on Thursday that it’s started accepting applications from governmental and organizational accounts that want a grey checkmark. It says that accounts that are eligible for it include heads of state, members of Congress, headquarters-level, regional-level and country-level institutional accounts The National Park Service and the US president both have grey checks.

It is difficult to ignore the fact that April 1st is the worst day of the year, and that a large part of Musk’s personality is being a troll. It’s extremely possible that this announcement, which came from the Twitter Verified account and not Musk’s account, is just an attempt to freak out people with legacy check marks. It is a common meme that media members are overrepresented in a pool of verified users, and these days Musk does not like the media.

It is possible that this was actually intended to be a troll, and that the date was just chosen because Musk likes to work 69 and 420 into everything he does. It just put a huge banner up that said the change is at the top of a verified reporters timeline, so maybe that is going to happen.

On April 1st, we will be winding down our legacy verified program, and removing legacy verified checkmarks.

Immediately the program was flooded with users who paid for counterfeit accounts pretending to be users such as former President Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, LeBron James and Nintendo.

The Nintendo account that had been suspended had posted an image of a video game character giving a middle finger. The athlete was portrayed in the account as requesting a trade. The fake Trump account tweeted, “This is why Elon Musk’s plan doesn’t work.”

Hide or Not Hide: The Role of Twitter Blue in Searching for Hidden Checkmarks on Blogs and Twitter Discussions of Paluzzi’s Post

It is difficult to know if hiding your checkmark would protect you, as you can search through verified Twitter Blue users. In theory, though, Twitter could also let you opt out of showing up there, too, though Paluzzi’s post doesn’t show any evidence of that.