Odds & ends #13: no stars on thars edition

Elon Musk's belief that he's in a "slobs vs. snobs" comedy may finally (hopefully) put Twitter out of its misery.

If you’re a normal person who values your time, you’re probably not keeping up with all the latest developments on Twitter, which seems to be either a lawsuit or a bored hacker away from shutting down entirely. On April 20th¹, it was announced that “legacy verification” checkmarks would be removed, a move Elon Musk had been threatening since buying Twitter back in fall of last year. Instead, checkmarks would only be given to those who paid for Twitter Blue, a premium subscription service that was intended to make up for the loss of ad revenue.

Twitter Blue comes with some dubious perks, such as being able to edit tweets (okay, fine), higher placement in comment threads (which makes it easier to ignore and/or block), less ads (not zero ads, mind you, just less), being able to use italic and bold fonts (already available with a keyboard app), longer tweets (which no one will read), and access to Twitter’s open source code (which is already out there if you know where to look). What it doesn’t offer is identity protection, the sole intended purpose of the original checkmark, which used to be free. Now, to be “verified” only means that you’re paying the second richest man in the world $8 a month². No proof of identification is required, just a phone number.

While the guidelines for who used to get checkmarks were vague and inconsistent, and many who earned one eventually fell victim to the dreaded blue check disease³, it did do what it was supposed to do, which was preventing users from doing something like, say, creating an account in which they claim to be Stephen King and posting Holocaust denier rhetoric. Now, as long as you have a telephone number and $8 to burn, you can claim to be whoever you want to be.

The marks falling for this scam are, as you might expect, a lot of people who describe themselves as “entrepreneurs” and “crypto investors⁴,” all of whom spend much of their time on Twitter sloppily fellating Musk and praising his business acumen, even though it appears that most of his decisions in running Twitter have been based largely both in trolling, and in getting more eyeballs on his own tweets. We know this is all a lark for him, because he likes to use that laugh-crying emoji a lot, and one can assume that obnoxiously cavalier attitude extends toward someone worrying if their name will be falsely used to post child pornography.

Despite these concerns, the expected rush to purchase Twitter Blue subscriptions after the legacy checkmarks were stripped didn’t happen. In fact, within the first day after they were gone, just 28 new subscriptions were activated. That’s not a typo. 28. Former bluechecks, like the aforementioned Stephen King, Bette Midler, and Lebron James, didn’t just reject Musk’s “this is a nice Twitter account, it’d be a shame if anything happened to it” bait, they publicly spoke out against it.

Ignoring the possibility that maybe said celebrities didn’t want to rub elbows with users named “MAGAMom88” or “xdiarrheafartzx,” initially Musk stans mocked them, then tried shaming them. Professional British asshole Piers Morgan called out King specifically, claiming that he owed it to Musk for all the free publicity, as if King was using Twitter for anything other than posting dad jokes. When that didn’t work, Musk gave his loudest celebrity detractors “verified” status, smugly claiming it was a “gift.”

In addition to being obnoxious, forcing subscriptions on those who don’t want it is also illegal. Think of it this way: if you ran a sandwich shop, and you forced a sandwich into Tom Hanks’ hand, you cannot then say that Tom Hanks is endorsing your shop. He has to agree to it in advance⁵. “Gift” or not, it’s deceitful to claim that Stephen King, or Lebron James, or William Shatner paid for their verification, let alone that they provided a phone number. It seems implausible that Musk didn’t know this, but he now seems to be afflicted with the same petty, vindictive brainworms that have infected the entire GOP over the past decade, where sticking it to your enemies is worth whatever legal fallout may come later⁶.

At any rate, to solve this current issue (and presumably keep a few more process servers at bay), as of this writing “verified” status has been given to everyone with a million or more followers, whether they paid for it or not⁷. Unsurprisingly, this has riled up the Musk stans who both ponied up the cash, and cheered the original change as pushback against the “elite” who won’t let Twitter become either a cryptocurrency hub, or a marketplace of ideas (those ideas being that vaccines are bad, but phrenology is a legitimate science). The blue check, originally perceived as a symbol of validity and importance (even if some people who had one were total unknowns outside of Twitter), is now a red flag indicating “block with all deliberate speed.”

I’ve never had a blue check. While I’ve somehow managed to collect 2,300 followers, I’m still a nobody, and I’m pretty okay with that. I don’t have the kind of reach that makes it so that posting an innocuous thing like “the new Evil Dead movie is good” results in a thread of hostile replies and quote tweets I can’t see. So I’ve been observing this latest example of Elon Musk stepping on his own balls at a mostly anthropological level. It’s fascinating how far too many people (not as many as he would like, but still) perceive Musk, the second richest man in the entire world, as a humble businessman standing up to the “elite.” He just loves America and free speech so much that he has no choice but to give Nazis a platform, what could be more “disruptive” than that?

To see grown adults, possibly even some who have held down a job or known a woman’s touch, treat this entire blue check thing as either standing up for freedom, or a heroic stand by the nerds against the popular kids (even though the nerds have been winning in all aspects of American culture since the beginning of the 21st century), is to be reminded that, at some point in the recent past, we all completely lost our minds. We just took our brains out of our skulls and collectively dropped them into a giant garbage disposal. That anyone cares about any of this, let alone picking it up as some sort of banner of righteousness, is astonishing to me. It’s a stark reminder that we are living in very dumb times, and the internet was probably a mistake.

1. The choice of this date is almost certainly not a coincidence, given Musk’s epic bacon sense of humor, which results in him still posting Chuck Norris jokes in the year 2023 A.D.

2. $1,000 if you’re a business account (and don’t mind flushing $1,000 down the toilet every month).

3. Exhibited by the persistent belief that your opinion is not just needed, but demanded, regardless of the subject.

4. There are also a lot of racists, transphobes, someone called “CatTurd2",” and people who describe themselves as “pure bloods,” which seem like the kind of folks Musk might not want to associate himself with for long-term business goals, but what do I know, my dad didn’t own an emerald mine.

5. You’ll probably also have to name a sandwich after him. Maybe a nice turkey and cheddar on a kaiser roll, uncomplicated but reliable, and everybody likes it.

6. See also: DeSantis, Ron.

7. Or if they’re currently alive or not, given that Anthony Bourdain’s account got one too.