Twitter Is The Shit Show We Never Realised We Needed
Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2022
Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.
The wholesale lack of self-awareness is astounding. Musk — a billionaire — makes like he’s siding with the “peasants” (his word) by offering users the chance to pay for a service they now enjoy for free. The fact that he’s pretending to side with the Average Joes in a war against the “lords” is laughable when one considers that Musk’s enemy is verified users. Meaning, accounts who actually are who they say they are. That’s it. Blue check status is non-partisan; it’s shared by conservatives, progressives, vegans, hunters, Fortune 100 companies, small family-owned businesses, sports teams, magazines, newspapers, blogs and government agencies across the globe. It’s the opposite of elitist — unlike the endless legions of anonymous users, these are accounts willing to put their real world identities and reputations behind their online presence.
Full disclosure, I received a blue checkmark this past year. As a journalist covering music, entertainment and culture, I provided the documentation requested to prove that my account actually belonged to me and one morning I woke up and there was the little checkmark next to my name. It implies no political outlook nor does it advocate any point of view. It simply tells the Twitterverse that whatever tweets issue from this account, Twitter can verify that they very much are from Joe Daly the metal journalist.
The rumblings are that very soon, anybody with a blue checkmark will need to pay a nominal monthly fee (nearly $100/year) to retain that designation. Moreover, Musk has implied that anybody can acquire this checkmark for that very monthly fee. In doing so, Musk would convert the blue checkmark from a valuable weapon against online impersonators, scammers and spam accounts into the equivalent of Flickr’s “Pro” badge — just a designation that that user pays for additional features.
Bring on the fake accounts! Whether or not Arby’s ponies up the cash to keep their checkmark, you can rest assured that thirty new “verified” Arby’s accounts will pop up in due course. The onus will then be on the users to check things like account registration date, number of followers, tweet content, etc., to ascertain whether or not they’re viewing the real Arby’s.
One promised benefit of this new fee scale is that people who pay for the checkmark will see only half the ads (not zero ads, as most other paid services offer; only half). Honestly, there’s so much ad pollution across the Internet that it’s hard to see anybody actually noticing the difference. Moreover, it’s a huge F.O. to their current advertisers. Think about it — you’re an advertiser who’s paid a tidy sum to get your content fed into Twitter’s endless matrix of timelines. While Twitter is dropping your cheques into their coffers each month, now they’re offering to hide your ads from users for an additional fee! Talk about playing both sides against the middle. You’re the middle, by the way. It’s no wonder that major advertisers are leaving Twitter in droves.
But despite Musk’s frothy and short-sighted puffery about democratising the platform (for a fee), he’s already betrayed an astonishing lack of common sense. Slowly but surely, he’s going to wring every penny he can to offset the inevitable loss he’ll endure after overpaying for Twitter (remember - he already tried to back out of the deal before being forced to go through with the purchase). For someone who fancies himself a visionary and an innovator, it’s interesting that he’s falling back on the laziest and oldest of platforms — populism — to bilk his customers for more cash. Don’t forget — the users are the ones who make it all possible. They’re the ones creating the content — Twitter allows companies to shoehorn ads around it. Now Twitter is asking people to essentially pay for the privilege of providing content and clicking on ads. It’s surreal.
But despite Musk’s best efforts to run it into the ground, Twitter isn’t going anywhere. Never mind the celebrity exodus — people will huff and puff about leaving — and many will — but there’s no replacement for Twitter. Not Mastodon, not Vero and not any of the other would-be social media titans. Twitter is established — everybody knows it’s there, they know how it works and its users have grown accustomed to using it for quick news and posting information to their highly-personalised networks. While it’s hard to see Musk’s strategy as leading to anything but the complete decimation of Twitter, in time, someone will take it off his hands at a reduced price and hammer it into something new, but likely not much different than what it is today.
And so we wait to see what’s next. I considered ditching it altogether. The reality is that with a small number of users, most of whom are almost certainly filtered out by Twitter’s algorithms, my ranting and raving is noticed by precious few. Plus, unless you actually seek out my page to read my Tweets, you’re only going to see my activity if we’re on at the same time and I happen to pass through your timeline. Thankfully, most of my writing is promoted by the magazines in which it appears — outlets with real social media horsepower. Still, I’ve put a lot of content out on my timeline and I’ve made a lot of legitimately wonderful connections that are exclusively the result of my Twitter account. I’ve made real world friendships through Twitter and gleaned vast numbers of music, book and movie recommendations. On one hand, Twitter is a toilet of toxicity; on the other hand, it’s a place where I can get news and share ideas. So for now, I’m going to wait it out and see. My suspicion is that real change is on the way but whether or not it lasts remains to be seen.