Twitter's badge of dishonor

The weekend's verification bonfire is an all-time case study in doing trust and safety wrong

Apr 25, 2023

“blue bird setting a checkmark on fire, cartoon style” / DALL-E

Today let’s talk about Twitter’s darkly hilarious misadventure with verification badges over the weekend through two lenses: first tech policy, then business.

However messy they were, the basic events of the weekend are not in dispute. After months of saber rattling, on Thursday morning Twitter at last went ahead and did what it had long promised to do: remove the verification badges of everyone who is not subscribed to Twitter Blue.

As before, impersonators immediately swarmed the platform. Fake popes, RuPauls, and paramilitary groups all appeared and began to spread misinformation. Much of the mischief was essentially comedic — though some, as with that paramilitary group, was aimed at sowing chaos in a war zone.

At the same time, with the loss of those checkmarks on hundreds of thousands of previously verified politicians, government accounts, celebrities and journalists, discerning who might be responsible for any given tweet immediately became much trickier. Is that really Robert DeNiro — or just someone who swapped out the first “o” for a “0”? (It was the latter, and it fooled his friend Henry Winkler.)

In one fell swoop, a problematic but essential aspect of Twitter was vaporized in pursuit of subscription revenue. (About which more later.) Had that been all that happened this weekend, we would have more than enough to talk about. But then things got much more chaotic.

First, Elon Musk said that he personally paid the subscription fees for LeBron James, Stephen King, William Shatner, and other celebrities — in some cases, to their horror. Turning the old verification program into Musk’s personal Patreon had caused the badge to lose nearly all of its former cachet; many users began talking openly of blocking all newly verified users on sight. That led celebrities like King to protest that he had not, in fact, subscribed to Blue — to which Musk replied, memorably: “You’re welcome namaste 🙏.”

Click on King’s new, unwanted “verified” badge and you receive the following message: “This account is verified because they are subscribed to Twitter Blue and verified their phone number.” In the case of King and other unwanted badge recipients, neither was true.

In this way, on the first day of the new verification system, Musk managed to destroy it for a second time. The first when he completely changed the meaning of “verifying” an account without changing the visual design; the second came when, after giving verification that new meaning, he changed it again without telling anyone. Verification might now mean that you are paying for Blue; it might also mean that someone else is.

That was Thursday. By Sunday, verification had taken on yet another possible meaning: that no one was paying for the account at all. After formerly verified accounts shrugged en masse at the loss of their badges, an apparently panicked Twitter sought to restore some prestige to the program by restoring checkmarks to large accounts, including what appeared to be most with more than 1 million followers.

But even this was done with no apparent rhyme or reason. Here’s Low De Wei at Bloomberg:

Users were quick to speculate on whether the label was automatically provided to accounts that cleared a million subscribers. But there appeared to be key exceptions, with the profiles of stars like actor Ryan Reynolds still missing a blue tick he once held, despite having more than 21 million followers.
More bewilderment was in store after people noticed that dead personalities’ accounts also sported the label, such as celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain and National Basketball Association player Kobe Bryant. Bourdain died in 2018 and Bryant in 2020.

There was another, apparently punitive aspect to some users being awarded checkmarks once again. Company critics including Hasan Piker, Matt Binder, and Weird Twitter king @dril all received what the press immediately began to call “spite” badges, to the confusion of all.

And as if that wasn’t enough — in the midst of all this, and after weeks of trolling public media outlets like NPR by assigning them various labels intended to be derogatory, Twitter dropped them for both independent public media and state-funded propaganda outlets from China, Russia, and other countries. And so what could have served as an alternative verification system for some prominent journalists went up in smoke as well.

There was a time — call it “November” — when I found Musk’s thrashing with Twitter depressing. It was sad to watch a product that could be so entertaining and educational wither under his oppressive ignorance.

By now, though, it’s clear that Twitter is headed into bankruptcy. And with Musk determined not to learn any lessons from his first six months running the company, we’re getting an unexpected gift: a natural experiment in what would happen to a large social platform if you systematically blew up every trust and safety system it has.

Among conservatives, after all, it’s a truism that content moderation is too aggressive; that platforms would thrive by adopting a free-speech ethos; and that Silicon Valley liberals are out of touch with what most people actually want from their social networks.

The perma-flailing of alt-platforms like Parler, Truth Social, and Gab has offered ample evidence that this is not the case. But the failure of Twitter on such a grand scale that even its smugly anti-woke investors, led by Andreessen Horowitz, won’t be able to ignore it.

And on the flip side, all the trust and safety workers struggling to retain their jobs in this layoff-heavy year now have an excellent example of how their work supports and makes businesses possible.

So that’s the tech policy angle: Musk’s Twitter has become a historic case study in the relationship between tech policy and the health of a social network. For that, I’m sincerely grateful.

That leaves the business angle — and it’s worth saying just how bad for business all of this has been.

Since Musk took over, his friend David Sacks has been selling him on the idea that Twitter should become a subscription business. Musk has an aversion to ad-based businesses generally, and Sacks offered him an alternative: sell Twitter as enterprise software to individuals, sports teams, publishers, and other organizations that would see value in verifying their presence on the platform. Individuals get blue checks; organizations get gold ones.

It’s not at all clear that such a business would generate more than the $5 billion a year that the old Twitter used to make. But to even have a chance, the verified badge would have to retain enough of its value that organizations would conceivably pay for it.

The events of the past weekend likely ended those hopes for good. As with blue checks, gold checks have been granted to various non-paying organizations based on undisclosed criteria. Other organizations are applying for gold checks, being rejected, and complaining that Twitter won’t refund the $1,000 application fee. Twitter’s idea to boost the number of paying organizations is to require advertisers to subscribe to Blue in order to post ads on the platform, while giving a free gold check to anyone who spends $1,000 a month with the company.

Reading all this, it’s no wonder that Twitter ad revenue is down 50 percent since October. And it’s now clear individuals aren’t going to pay, either: NBC’s Ben Collins reported that on Thursday, Twitter Blue saw only 28 net new signups — twenty-eight.

It’s all going badly enough that even some employees who are sympathetic to Musk are blanching at the verification mess.

“Could have avoided all the chaos by just saying hey, everyone has access to verification now, all legacy verified gets 6 months free blue verification,” one employee wrote in Blind, the pseudonymous workplace forum. “Our goal is to provide same access to everyone. Instead we picked fights with our most valuable customers. Now Elon is deciding who gets free Blue. Full circle. There is a lot that Elon is right about, this is just not one of those.”

More on Twitter: My story on Yoel Roth’s time at Twitter, both before and after Musk took over, aired this weekend on This American Life and can now be found on your podcast player of choice. It was produced by the great Davis Land and David Kestenbaum; I’m so grateful to them and everyone at This American Life for helping me talk about trust and safety with a whole new audience.

Talk about this edition with us in Discord: This link will get you in for the next week.

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Send us tips, comments, questions, and suggested This American Life pitches: casey@platformer.news and zoe@platformer.news.

Sascha Pallenberg

Apr 25, 2023Edited

"a natural experiment in what would happen to a large social platform if you systematically blew up every trust and safety system it has"

That's exactly what it is and I'm enjoying each and every second of it. There's no way he can talk his way out of it.

It clearly shows that Tesla and SpaceX are somewhat successful despite Musk. But at Twitter no one tries to control him and anyone can see that the emperor has no clothes.

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