This comes as a surprise to absolutely nobody of course. Not even to Musk, who is adding blue verification tick marks to celebrity accounts, whose owners protest in public that they don’t want them.
Why would they not protest when the paid Twitter Blue accounts are often associated with crypto con artists and boosters, or vile nazis and extreme right-wingers, often with very few followers? It’s not the company anyone half sensible would want to keep.
Musk now claims to be paying out of his own pocket for some of the “verified” accounts to save face.
Furthermore, some big-follower accounts have had their ticks restored, as it dawned on people that blocking anyone verified was a good way to clean up your timeline.
Grotesquely, this meant a number of dead celebrity accounts have had their tick marks returned too.
The infamous @dril account, with humorous tweets that are possibly a little challenging for parts of the Herald’s readership, was also “reverified”.
“Wint”, the operator of the @dril account, would not have a bar of it, and has done their best to get rid of the “baneful blue mark” by changing name repeatedly.
As of writing, @dril’s 1.7 million followers are waiting to see if Musk will rage-ban the account for not paying the bumptious billionaire’s senseless Twitter Blue subscription game.
Twitter Blue seems to have gone down like a lead balloon with users. Whereas a week ago the Verified tab on my Twitter account had more users than I cared to count, there are now none. Zero, zilch, nada.
Who would want to pay even the discounted $135 a year (only annual payments are offered now, and not monthly ones) to a small set of features added and be served ads just like accounts that don’t subscribe to Twitter Blue?
Like every comedy though, there is a serious side: Removing tick marks lets harmful trolls impersonate real accounts. Not only that, but some fakers pretend to be someone else and buy Twitter Blue verification to make it look as if they are, although it seems even that business model has crashed with hardly anyone subscribing.
Musk and Twitter are trying to counteract some of that bogosity by adding, and I kid you not, verification tick marks. So far we’ve seen yellow badges for the media and grey ones for government officials.
Thing is, Twitter recognised early on that setting up yet another service that was used by trolls and abusers wasn’t going to fly with advertisers. That’s a pretty obvious position, and it was partly asserted to keep government watchdogs that had become concerned about increasing online abuse at bay on platforms that have huge reach like Twitter did.
Twitter developed moderation policies for a worldwide audience, which is incredibly hard to do given how diverse people around the globe are. Account verification was part of that, an effort to protect Twitter users, advertisers and the social network itself.
It meant that when disasters or important events took place, users, authorities and journalists were able to share information, organise and interact with each other. Almost in real time too, especially after Twitter fixed the “fail whale” technical issues that took down the service frequently.
Twitter gained trust and it was hard won. It didn’t always pan out right of course, with pile-ons taking place and erroneous rumours being amplified, but generally speaking, the social network earnt a spot as a very useful resource. This is why it attracted users, and why Musk and investors plonked down almost $72 billion for Twitter.
Take that crucial and hugely valuable feature of Twitter and completely trash it. That’s what Musk has done, and it’s no wonder Twitter is now worth less than half of what he and investors paid for it.
With trust evaporating, there is little chance that Twitter will be able to get anyone to pay the exorbitant US$42,000 a month charge for accessing the social network’s application programming interface or API. This is what third-party developers, researchers and enterprises use to talk to Twitter’s servers, exchanging data with them. Access used to be free.
Last month, Microsoft dropped support for Twitter from its social media management tools because of the API charge; worse for Twitter though, Microsoft’s Digital Marketing Centre, which is an advertising platform, will also drop support for the social network.
Twitter remains a unique service though. While users are peeling off there’s still comedy gold to be had as Musk makes one embarrassing and laughable bumbling fail after the other.
Thinking about it, that is actually a novel way to add value to Twitter for users. Maybe Musk should look into monetising that?
