I didn’t realize the past week’s verification saga could get sillier, but here we are, watching Dril fight Elon Musk to keep a checkmark off his name. You know you’re selling a great product when you start punishing your most popular users by giving it to them for free.
Some Twitter users, including @dril, are advocating for people to block anyone who subscribes to Twitter Blue. Those who do so are a lot easier to identify after the Twitter check apocalypse.
Here’s @dril, in an email to Mashable:
“99% of twitter blue guys are dead-eyed cretins who are usually trying to sell you something stupid and expensive, and now they want to pay a monthly subscription fee to boost their dog shit posts front and center,” Twitter user @dril told me in an email when I asked about his thoughts on the #BlockTheBlue campaign.
“blocking them and encouraging others to do the same on a massive scale is the complete opposite of what they want,” he continued. “Its funny.”
After rolling out subscriptions (which are really just rebranded Super Follows) in the US, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, Twitter has announced that creators in the EU, UK, and EEA can now sell subscriptions as well.
NPR reports that, per a former Twitter employee:
“What I understand to have happened is, at Elon Musk’s direction, Twitter’s Trust and Safety Team, or what’s left of it, took a chainsaw to the visibility filtering rules,” said one of the former employees, who was an executive at the company.
Twitter removed its “government-funded media” labels as well, so now it will be that much more difficult to know if stuff that feels like propaganda might be coming from a state-controlled accounts.
After confirming that he’s comping verification for LeBron, Stephen King, and William Shatner, Musk is now offering to pay for Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham’s blue check as well. Graham isn’t taking him up on the offer.
Turns out you can’t actually buy status, even if you can technically afford it.
Does this episode of The Vergecast feature several of the world’s best-known rappers? That depends on how you define “feature,” which turns out to be a pretty thorny question. This episode definitely features laser bongs and Snapchat bots, though. But not blue checkmarks or Netflix DVDs. None of those anymore.
Hip hip hip hooray.
(For context, Pope Francis was among the accounts stripped of its Blue checkmark as part of Twitter’s cull of legacy verified users. His account now carries a grey checkmark, which is meant for government and multilateral organizations.)
A bunch of folks got emails this morning from Twitter informing them that they’d have to start spending money for the privilege of spending money. The company is now requiring advertisers to buy checkmarks in order to advertise on the service.
If any ISPs are watching this: please don’t start getting any funny ideas.
Remember when Musk pitched this whole pay-for-the-blue-checkmark business as a way to democratize Twitter, suggesting pesky elites would no longer get preferential status? How the “lords and peasants system” was “bullshit”?
Today, he turned right around and paid for LeBron James and Stephen King’s verified badges. Guess the rest of us are peasants.
I’ve been off of Twitter for about two years now and it’s incredible. You really can stop thinking about it after just a little while if you commit to moving on.
None of these platforms are inevitable! They will all die someday! You don’t have to be on them!
“Real winners quit.”
