Tumblr Gets the Last Laugh
After haggling with the author Stephen King (don’t worry about it), Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, decided that Twitter users would have to pay $8 a month to keep their blue verification check marks. Previously, these check marks were free and indicated an account was authentic—that’s the real New York Times, the real President Joe Biden, the real Slim Jim, and so on. They’re sort of a status symbol, in the sense that check marks make users stand out, and the process for getting one is opaque and mysterious. And they kind of confer importance by suggesting that a person or an entity or a brand with a check might be someone who someone else would attempt to impersonate. People sometimes talk about verification badges as being signifiers of “clout.”
Musk renovated the blue-check-mark about as quickly as you would imagine. A blue check appeared next to an account pretending to be George W. Bush, which tweeted, “I miss killing Iraqis” with a sad-face emoji. A blue check next to an account masquerading as the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, which tweeted, “We are excited to announce insulin is free now.” (The verification program is now on until after Thanksgiving.)
