[chownie]

Careful, when you ramp the hyperbole up to this point you are essentially just lying.

A decade ago you could quickly check the blue mark and know that the account most likely belonged to the person it was labelled for. The people who had a mark when they shoudn't have were by far the minority, and mistakes were the exception.

In 2026 a blue checkmark actually means the account is far more likely to be fake, more likely to be lying and more likely to be engagement trolling. There's no guarantee it even belongs to a human person. The platform gives the account holder money if they can convince you to click spam links!

It's not even close to having the same value now as it did then.

[surgical_fire]

> A decade ago you could quickly check the blue mark and know that the account most likely belonged to the person it was labelled for.

They routinely removed blue checkmarks of people that had naughty opinions. The account was known to belong to the actual person. This was no mistake, it was just the good boy badge being removed for vibes.

My point is not that Twitter now under its retarded billionaire king is better. It is not.

It was shit then, it is shit now. The world would be objectively a better place if Twitter had never existed.

The turd just smells different under Musk. You happened to enjoy the old smell.

[chownie]

> They routinely removed blue checkmarks of people that had naughty opinions

This is actually you doing it again, lying-via-hyperbole. This didn't happen routinely (it was high profile enough to get news stories the few times it did) and it was pretty specifically white supremacist groups.

> You happened to enjoy the old smell.

If you approach conversation with a little more honesty yourself you might not just fall into the assumption other people are partisan.

[surgical_fire]

> assumption other people are partisan.

That's what you are doing. I am pretty left-leaning myself, if you look at my post history.

Twitter was a notorious toxic dump long before Musk acquired it. Nothing in what I described was a lie.

The blue checkmark was supposed to be something that meant "account is verified, person is who they say they are". It was weaponized by the platform itself to mean "this person has no naughty opinions". Now I ask, was this an improvement?

Now it is actually more straightforward. "Blue checkmark means person gives money to Twitter on a monthly basis". It is still a toxic dump, it just smells different.