Alex Salmond was one of the first to fall victim to Twitter’s blue tick cull. An account with the same name as his began sending out disparaging tweets about his sub-optimal bowel movements. The account was tweeting shortly after Elon Musk removed 400,000 ‘legacy verified’ blue ticks, little badges that sit next to a user’s name, which were originally designed to stop impersonation.
Musk’s removal of the verified ticks – previously given to celebs, politicians and journalists to prove they are who they said they are – makes way for a free market approach to verification. Any tweeter can now pay £9.60 a month for the blue tick (provided their email address has been verified). As well as profile clout, they get access to extra features such as the ability to edit tweets, have an NFT as your profile picture and be prominently shown in the ‘For you’ feed that almost nobody uses.
Some journalists were outraged by the loss of their verified status
Some journalists were outraged by the loss of their verified status. One BBC journalist called the decision ‘dangerous’. Hysterics aside, how useful were blue ticks in the first place? One study from 2019 found that having a blue tick badge had no influence over whether the account was trusted. Instead, the researchers said, the anonymity of a user was more likely to result in negative perceptions of the page. Twitter users are already good at spotting the real and the fake accounts without a verification system in place at all. The same study found around 40 per cent of users don’t even notice if an account has a blue tick or not anyway.
This is perhaps why journalists and media organisations aren’t all rushing to get Twitter blue. One researcher has estimated that just 5 per cent of those with ‘legacy’ ticks have bothered to sign up for the new paid-for verification system.
That said, last month Twitter published its recommendation algorithm – the computing code that helps decide what tweets you’re more likely to engage with and what content to show you first. It suggests there may be engagement value in subscribing to Twitter Blue. Arvind Narayanan, professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, looked at the code and found it gives a 2 to 4x boost in the ‘ranking formula’ (though that doesn’t directly translate to the same increase in reach).
Many users are happy about the end of exclusive verification. Twitter first launched badges in 2009, in part because it had been sued by a retired American baseball player after an account pretending to be him was used to make fun of players in the team he managed. The power of the blue ticks grew from then on until the unverified were given light relief in 2020 when verified users were temporarily banned from tweeting as the company tried to clean up a Bitcoin hacking scam. They, along with Elon, hope Twitter will become a more ‘democratic’ place under the new paid-for order.
It’s likely that Musk will make the engagement benefits even greater to encourage people to subscribe. Already the new blue ticked accounts appear further up in my feed. But it’s not the only option for those reluctant to pay up. There are two other kinds of verification marks Twitter is dishing out: grey for government organisations and gold for large companies. The top 100,000 accounts get to keep theirs for free too. They can then pay an extra monthly fee to grant verification to their staff.
The truth is that Musk is in a bit of a hole. Not one that will cause him any real financial difficulty, but he doesn’t want to run the company he bought for £35 billion at a loss forever. So, he has to do what he can to increase revenue streams on the platform. But he’s having fun too. The author Stephen King had made a point of saying he’d never pay for Twitter Blue so Elon decided to buy it for him: when the blue ticks vanished from the platform, those who had already bought Blue were exposed, with King looking like he was among them.
The clout of the tick has moved to the Musk fans and the hardcore tweeters – those happy to pay the monthly fee for a service they spend hours on. The platform’s power users are no longer the Pestons, Kuenssberg and Morgans. They’re now those users with a string of numbers, Union Jacks or EU flag emoji in their usernames. The anons have inherited the earth.
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