[_djo_]

You're misunderstanding why it gets mocked.

Twitter launched a paid tier, Twitter Blue, before the Musk takeover. It was a sensible move, offering additional features such as edit functionality for power users, but not harming the experience for those who chose not to buy into it.

Most importantly, it was entirely separate to the use of blue ticks to denote verified and authentic accounts. In fact, there was as far as I know no visual indication that someone was a Twitter Blue user.

When Musk took over, one of his first changes was to combine Twitter Blue and the verified programme, removing any actual verification in favour of a claim that anyone who had paid was 'verified'. The company also artificially boosts the posts of those who have bought this new premium tier, which disadvantages everyone else.

Buying a blue tick is seen, quite rightly now, as buying an artificial boosting via the algorithm and that's just pure vanity.

[Amezarak]

> Most importantly, it was entirely separate to the use of blue ticks to denote verified and authentic accounts

Blue ticks had nothing to do with being "verified" or "authentic." They were handed out randomly to some celebrities. bigcorps, and friends of Twitter employees. As far as I know a bluecheck was never handed out to anyone who wasn't who they said they were (although you could get them under pseudonyms too), but the "wrong" celebrities or normal people could not get them. It was a mark of social cachet, not authenticity.

[_djo_]

That’s false. The programme was explicitly launched to highlight accounts that Twitter the company had verified as actually representing the person. [0]

It was launched after the company was sued by a sports star who was impersonated. Until Musk took over it could always be relied on as proof of an account’s authenticity.

What you’re complaining about isn’t that it represented something else, but that as with any large scale verification process it doesn’t scale well and the process was opaque.

Twitter cycled through various approaches to solve the problem. At first they merely reached out to people, based on the popularity of accounts representing them, their level of fame, and their risk of impersonation (or evidence of prior impersonation) and as and when the team had capacity. Therefore celebrities, politicians, and journalists were prioritised. However, this was a flawed process that was too US-centric and too US West Coast-centric on top of that.

They later opened up public applications but closed it down when they were overwhelmed with requests and couldn’t process them all. They ran into all the usual verification challenges, including language differences and the difficulty of verifying across countries. So they reverted back to the previous model while working on a way to use external factors to allow for a scaled up verification process in the future. That process stopped when Musk bought them.

The claim that it was only handed out to people for social cachet doesn’t hold water. For one, Republican politicians, Fox News and other conservative publication journalists, and sufficiently notable right-leaning celebrities all had blue ticks. The company even verified Jason Kessler, though that stirred up a public controversy that forced it to pause the programme for a bit. [1]

It wasn’t a perfect programme of course, but it did what it said it would: If you saw that an account had a blue tick you could trust it meant it was an authentic account that Twitter had verified. That aspect of the system never failed.

[0] https://mashable.com/archive/twitter-verified-accounts-2 [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/09/technology/jason-kessler-...

[Amezarak]

Yes, bluechecks were who they said they were. But just because you were who you said you were did not mean you could get a bluecheck.

Bluecheck -> authentic. Authentic !> bluecheck.

There was no path for most people almost all of the time to get a bluecheck, and they could be removed for arbitrary reasons having nothing to do with your identity. The "process" consisted of someone at Twitter deciding you were worthy, based on arbitrary criteria including "you're my friend."

> The claim that it was only handed out to people for social cachet doesn’t hold water. For one, Republican politicians, Fox News and other conservative publication journalists, and sufficiently notable right-leaning celebrities all had blue ticks.

Having bad politics doesn't mean one doesn't have social cachet. You yourself say here "notable" - but again, just being notable was not enough, though it was a big help. And of course, if you had the right friends, you could be completely non-notable.

Your post begins with "that's false", but the rest of it agrees with what I said.

In many old Twitter circles, having a bluecheck made you an object of derision for precisely these reasons - it didn't signify authenticity, it was a social marker that frequently came with inane tweets and thin skin that was perceived to arise due to an idea they thought they were "elite."

[_djo_]

Your post said Blue ticks had nothing to do with being "verified" or "authentic." and It was a mark of social cachet, not authenticity..

That is clearly false. The blue check was an accurate signal of authenticity through verification by Twitter. What it was not was a universal verification mechanism that scaled to being able to verify everyone who used the platform. Those are two different things, and the lack of universality does not mean that the programme was not useful in valuable in providing a means to prove authenticity and avoid impersonation of the many people it did cover.

Moreover, the company was actively working on ways to scale it up into being able to reliably verify many more people before Musk bought it.

Now all that is gone, and a blue check means nothing to other users of the platform other than as a sign that the holder is paying for premium features. It's no longer a trustworthy verification mechanism.

[Amezarak]

And yet somehow, impersonation is no more a problem on X than it was on Twitter.

The fact is nobody paid attention to the blue check except the people who had one. The outcry was because a set of people felt elite because of their blue checks and were upset that anyone could get one. Hilary Clinton or Donald Trump or Kanye West impersonators are not an issue on the platform.

[_djo_]

There have already been high profile impersonations, one of which caused a company’s stock to dive. Another was the infamous situation where Musk freaked out over people impersonating him.

The only reason it’s not worse is because of inertia and the fact that most public figures are still using the accounts they had when verification was in place. That won’t last. It’s also why public figures who are leaving for other platforms usually opt to keep their X accounts in place but dormant.

Kanye was in fact impersonated on Twitter in the past, it was one of the key reasons behind the introduction of Verified Accounts.[0]

I have also seen impersonators for all three of those you mentioned, especially in terms of crypto bots for Trump. However those are also three of the most heavily policed and watched profiles by the company’s understaffed moderating team, who proactively monitor for impersonations. That’s not true for lesser public figures: I just searched for a hand full of well-known journalists and found several impersonation profiles for them all.

What’s worse, their impersonation reporting function does not let you report the impersonation of someone who is not an active user. I know another public figure who doesn’t have an account there, doesn’t want one, but now hasn’t been able to get them to do anything about an impersonator who is using his name to scam others.

The current model is badly broken and decidedly worse than the verification system that existed before.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2009/06/06/facing-lawsuits-and-compla...