Nilay Patel
Just about says it all.
Twitter Archive
Archives for March 2023
Adi Robertson
The White House says it won’t pay Elon Musk for blue checks.
Add “the Biden administration” to the list of organizations that won’t be paying for staff to keep their blue checks on Twitter:
”It is our understanding that Twitter Blue does not provide person-level verification as a service. Thus, a blue check mark will now simply serve as a verification that the account is a paid user,” White House director of digital strategy Rob Flaherty told staffers in an email sent Friday afternoon.
The message specifically applied to White House staffers, so other agencies may have different policies — but we may see a lot of unverified government users soon.
Richard Lawler
Lords, peasants, and kings.
Elon Musk proposed his plan for paid verification as an alternative to the previous system of “lords & peasants,” but not everyone is buying in.
LeBron James — a Martin fan who is notoriously cheap, refusing to pay for data roaming or ad-free Pandora — isn’t paying to stay verified post-April 1st.
Jess Weatherbed
News outlets respond to Twitter Blue coercion with a resounding ‘meh.’
Twitter is removing blue checkmarks from legacy verified accounts tomorrow, which begs the question: which newsrooms will pony up for Twitter Blue so their staff remains verified?
“Not many” appears to be the answer, at least If the pool interviewed by BuzzFeed is anything to go by. For what it’s worth, Vox Media (our parent company) won’t be paying for staff Twitter Blue subscriptions, either.
Richard Lawler
Even after Twitter dropped SMS 2FA, someone still tried to hack my account via text.
Someone initiated a password reset request on my account (I prefer Mastodon these days) and then sent this message to try to get me to text them the verification code I received from Twitter. Don’t they know Twitter already cut off SMS 2FA for non-Blue subscribers?
(FYI - you should use another form of two-factor authentication on your account, and you should never, ever resend a verification code via text — unless you think you can get a good story out of it.)
Jess Weatherbed
Twitter is expanding Community Notes to debunk fake images.
Were you fooled by the AI-generated Dope Pope Francis image that started circulating last week? You’re not alone, and Twitter is now trying to help its users recognize when images aren’t what they seem.
There’s no release date yet, but Twitter is working on a new Community Notes feature that will follow a particular image across all tweets.
Jay Peters
Twitter’s For You tab won’t be all bad.
The For You tab is about to get much worse, but at least it will still show tweets from people you actually follow, Musk said on Tuesday in a clarification to his unpopular new policy for Twitter. I’ll still be sticking with the Following tab.
Elon Musk says Twitter’s For You page will only recommend verified accounts
Mitchell Clark and Jay Peters
Mitchell Clark and Jay Peters