The Lie We Tell Ourselves About Twitter
When I received my blue tick on Twitter a few years ago, people I knew in the real world were incredulous. How did I — a mere nobody, with scarcely a couple of thousand followers — merit the sort of badged verification honour previously reserved for Barack Obama, Mariah Carey and Cristiano Ronaldo?
The story I told people was that I went to Twitter HQ and challenged the Head of Twitter UK to a game of ping pong. If I win, verification; If I lose, no, um, verification. This story, I can now reveal, is not wholly true — though I did play, and win, a game of ping pong at Twitter HQ, where I also demanded, unsuccessfully, a blue tick. In fact, I got my blue tick by applying for it. And by having an email address, at the time, that was registered to a magazine that was on the mysterious list of approved publications. So the bods at Twitter recognised me as a journalist at a real publication, and gave me a tick.
Why did I want a blue tick? Nobody was impersonating me, and if they had been, I would’ve been deeply flattered. I have no fans or even “reply guys”. In truth, I never deserved a blue tick. But I wanted it for one reason: credibility.
This week, new Twitter overlord Elon Musk has announced plans to introduce an $8 subscription to Twitter’s paid service, which will allow pay-to-play users to get that same verification. This has outraged many people, who point out that it undermines the very reason for the verification process in the first place. The blue tick, they say, was about establishing that the account is real and, if not trusted, then accountable. You have to upload ID as part of the verification process, so someone at Twitter Towers knows that @nickfthilton is a real man called Nick Hilton. This increases trust and acts as a form of responsible gatekeeping. It is a very real issue and these are genuine solutions. But it’s also bollocks.
The lie that people are telling themselves about Twitter is that verification is a content moderation tool. It’s not. It’s a status signaller. It is a little badge on your account that says “look, look, I’m important!” or “I am a broadcaster on this platform, not a consumer”. It tells people that you have or had a real career, a real sense of status in your community. It says you are somebody. And so it’s no surprise that people who have achieved — either inadvertently, or by battling Jack Dorsey at ping pong — that status, want to retain it. But it’s also a really vulgar sentiment, and plays into all the things that Musk has said about Twitter having a patrician and plebeian class. And so instead, the focus becomes on this nebulous, bullshitty discussion of “trust” and protecting people from impersonation (and trust me: the vast majority of verified people on Twitter are in precisely no danger of impersonation).
I would say that for 10% of people with blue ticks, they represent a real defence against trolls and scammers. And I would say that, for the other 90%, they represent a boost to self-esteem and a sense of being part of the platform’s elite. But, of course, the minority position is more compelling and less vain, and therefore gets signal boosted like crazy now that the tick is under threat.
If I were to rack my brain for a parallel I might, by coincidence, stumble upon Tesla cars. Perhaps 10% of drivers use a Tesla because they are concerned about the environment, while the other 90% use them because they’re fast and flash and at the technological cutting edge. But when pushed on why they spent their life savings on a Tesla, I’ll bet that a disproportionate number err on the side of environmentalism. Green is a better look than greed.
This is all to say that I’m sort-of ambivalent about Musk’s plans for Twitter. I’d like to keep my blue tick (or white tick, on a blue rosette) because I like it as a status symbol, and that’s only meaningful if it’s not open to the proles (no offence proles). I like people to think I’m serious, and not just an internet crank with an addiction to the sound of my own voice. But I also recognise that’s a position that Twitter has no corporate responsibility to indulge.
One final thought: all the people who have been wanging on about losing their blue ticks, because it will erode the sense that some people are distinct from the heaving masses of trolls and bots, are the same people who agonise about Twitter’s issues with anonymity. There has been so much discussion about whether social media platforms should verify users via some form of ID, to stop anonymous accounts harassing people without fear of repercussion. These measures (which, for the record, I don’t agree with) have fallen down on just how hard they are to practically implement — but it’s clear that one of the most efficient compromises would be to get more credit cards on file. To buy a ticket, you need some sort of payment card, and that begins to leave a paper trail. It’s not foolproof but I suspect this is a counter-argument that will be made more and more as the process goes on, and pisses more and more people off. Pay us $8 and we’ll know who you are.
All the same, this is a storm in a teacup — and for $44bn, Elon Musk can destroy this company in whatever way he sees fit. Personally, I wouldn’t really touch it — I’d just use it as an aggressive lobbying tool for his genuinely profitable companies, Tesla and SpaceX.
