Blue ticks have disappeared from Twitter following a chaotic weekend that saw celebrities and publishers put their 2 cents in on the infamous verification policy.
Why is the verification policy infamous? Because there is no verification to be had. In a weekend where Elon Musk is making up and changing the rules as he goes, two things are certain: anyone with a subscription can get a blue checkmark, therefore anyone can be verified.
The most high profile of these arguments over the weekend was The New York Times, who said they will not pay to be verified on Twitter. As a company, they would not merely be paying $8 for the whole building, but would be expected to fork over $1,000 a month, plus the cost of verifying individual journalists employed by the organisation.
“The real tragedy of @NYTimes is that their propaganda isn’t even interesting”, Musk tweeted. “Also, their feed is the Twitter equivalent of diarrhea. It’s unreadable,” he added.
Once upon a time, so long ago (days, even) there was a blurb under a blue checkmarked name that told you either this checkmark is due to the user being subscribed to Twitter Blue or this user is a “Legacy user”, i.e. they were verified before Musk took over and are most likely a celebrity. This allowed users to differentiate between “Tom Hanks fo’ real” fan account and the real Tom Hanks’ personal account. Now, the blurb reads the same “This account is verified because it’s subscribed to Twitter Blue or is a legacy verified account”, erasing the point entirely.
