I started a Spoutible account this week and I’m liking how it feels. I also post at post.news and I tried Mastodon for a while (but got suspended twice for writing about politics. Yesterday, Spoutible’s comms team wrote that “we would like to express our concern about Elon Musk's recent announcement regarding Twitter's new policy. From April 15, only paid checkmarks will be featured in your recommendations, and bots will be allowed to be verified. We believe this policy poses a significant threat and should be a matter of concern for everyone. As a response, we are preparing to accommodate any extra load from users migrating from Twitter to Spoutible by adding additional servers to our network.”
Why have I been looking for alternatives to Twitter? Basically, Twitter's going through some profound changes as it morphs into another sordid platform for right-wing propaganda. Yesterday, Rachel Lerman and Fiaz Siddiqui reported the latest-- how it’s becoming a pay for play business platform for Elon Musk.
Last week Twitter said that today it will begin removing legacy blue check marks, instead reserving them for paying customers rather than for verified purveyors of reliable information. ‘On April 1st, we will begin winding down our legacy verified program and removing legacy verified check marks,’ the company tweeted. Those paying roughly $8 a month for Twitter Blue, which includes a handful of other features, will also be among the small subset of accounts boosted starting April 15 to Twitter’s main timeline, the ‘For You’ page. Twitter now requires a valid phone number and payment to attain the blue check, betting that spammers will not shell out large amounts of cash to flood the site with scams. News organizations including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post said Thursday they won’t pay for verification for their organizations or reporters, although the New York Times said there may be some rare exceptions.
The massive changes to Twitter’s verification system risk disrupting the site, according to two former employees, who spoke with The Post on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. Twitter has repeatedly incurred outages after making tweaks to its code, including this month, something that has prompted Musk to refer to the site as “brittle.”
Meanwhile, the company has had only a loose handle on the interplay between old and new check marks. After a surge in impersonation accounts in November, when the company began awarding check marks to those willing to pay $8, Twitter employees were not immediately able to distinguish legacy verified check marks from those newly awarded, The Post reported.
The removal of verification badges at such a wide scale has the potential to disrupt systems across Twitter’s website, including its recommendation algorithms, spam filters and help center requests. Twitter has previously relied on the badges as an important signal affecting all of those areas— for example, using verification to decide to boost a public figure’s tweet into a user’s timeline.
…The change expected Saturday could fundamentally change how Twitter is used and how it is trusted, users and experts say. If the fears are borne out, it will no longer be possible to quickly ascertain whether a public figure’s account is legitimately associated with that person, or the potential work of a sly impersonator. The perceived hand-wringing among the elite over the loss of the blue check— and its associated prestige— is a separate matter.
“I go onto Twitter and I interact with the blue check, and in my head I still assume they were verified out of some sort of process,” said Robyn Caplan, a senior researcher at the Data & Society Research Institute who is studying verified badge systems across social media companies. “There’s going to be a period of adjustment, and I think it’s going to be a much longer period than we think.”
The blue check mark on Twitter was first launched in 2009 as a way for the company to cut down on impersonation accounts, especially for celebrities. It grew over time to include thousands of verified accounts, ranging from government agencies to CEOs to athletes and movie stars to members of the media. The check mark has at times been decried as just another status symbol, a way for people to earn clout. But it’s also been used to confirm that account holders are indeed who they say they are.
…Twitter initially launched the paid blue check mark in November, shortly after Musk took over the company, and had to quickly roll back the feature after impersonation accounts popped up all over the site, causing confusion. One account, purporting to belong to drugmaker Eli Lilly, tweeted that insulin would now be free. (It was not Eli Lilly, and insulin is not free.)
When Twitter relaunched the service in December, it put in rules banning impersonation and requiring a valid phone number before users could get a blue check mark. But a Post columnist showed that it was possible to get around Twitter’s defenses, obtaining a check mark for an account impersonating a U.S. senator. And some experts say that verification does not go far enough to confirm identities— prompting a reckoning for the future of the site.
“For the past decade Twitter was the watering hole where world’s most interesting people could huddle together and rub shoulders,” said Matt Pearce, an internet culture reporter for the Los Angeles Times. “But now the place is collapsing slowly, it’s like dying in front of our eyes.”
He said he won’t pay to subscribe.
Twitter has introduced different check mark colors for different accounts— including gold checks for organizations and gray checks for government officials.
On Thursday, the company outlined its process for verifying organizations— such as government agencies and businesses— linking to a sign-up form. Twitter said the organizations will be vetted to ensure they are legitimate, and once approved, those entities will be responsible for verifying affiliated accounts. Those verified under the process would receive a badge showing the organization’s logo, Twitter said.
“Rather than relying on Twitter to be the sole arbiter of truth for which accounts should be verified, vetted organizations that sign up for Verified Organizations are in full control of vetting and verifying accounts they’re affiliated with,” the company said in a tweet.
“Important to establish whether someone actually belongs to an organization or not so as to avoid impersonation," Musk said in a tweet.
Twitter has been in a state of upheaval since Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, purchased the site he uses to communicate with his roughly 133 million followers on the site. The self-described “free speech absolutist” has said he wants to promote “free speech” and further Twitter’s role as a public town square.
When Musk first introduced the paid check mark, he positioned it as a way to make a more egalitarian site.
“Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue check mark is bullshit,” he wrote. “Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.”
But the rollbacks of legacy verification and other guardrails have some concerned. A Washington Post analysis this week found that Twitter is amplifying hate speech in its “For You” feed, based on which users accounts follow.
The changes are prompting concern among some who rely on the site, but don’t want to pay for it.
Emma Grae, a Scottish author with more than 13,000 followers on the site, said she expects her account will stop growing when she loses her verification check.
“It’s so frustrating too, as the old verification system has given me a lot opportunities with my writing— such as being asked to do talks about the Scots language— and I fear that I won’t get those chances now that I can’t prove I am who I say I am,” she said in a Twitter message.
Grae does not plan to pay for a check mark, saying that it seems like a way for Musk to recoup some of his investment and “in the process, he’s turning check marks into a bit of a joke,” she said.
For Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the conversation he sees online about whether to give Musk money is a kind of “virtue signaling,” he said.
“It’s a service like any other and we pay for subscriptions, we pay all these companies and they do things we object to,” he said. He said he’ll evaluate how useful Twitter Blue seems to be before deciding whether to subscribe.
Let me just close by noting an edifying essay by Natasha Lomas in TechCrunch: Twitter Is Dying, which is slightly different from what many people have been saying about Twitter already being effectively dead. She wrote that “It’s five months since Elon Musk overpaid for a relatively small microblogging platform called Twitter. The platform had punched above its weight in pure user numbers thanks to an unrivaled ability to both distribute real-time information and make expertise available. Combine these elements with your own critical faculty— to weed out the usual spam and bs— and it could feel like the only place online that really mattered… it contained essential ingredients that made it a go-to source for journalists or other curious types wanting to earwig on conversations between interesting people— whether subject experts or celebrities. It was also therefore a place where experts and celebrities could find community and an engaged audience— without the need for layers of message-filtering middlemen. Twitter was where these two sides met and (sometimes) meshed in messy conversation. There was an alluring (sometimes bruising) rawness to the medium… But the real pull and power of the platform came from the incredible wealth of knowledge any Twitter user could directly tap into— across all sorts of professional fields, from deep tech to deep space and far beyond— just by listening in on a discussion thread or sliding a question into someone’s DMs.”
Since Musk took over he has set about dismantling everything that made Twitter valuable— making it his mission to drive out expertise, scare away celebrities, bully reporters and— on the flip side— reward the bad actors, spammers and sycophants who thrive in the opposite environment: An information vacuum.
It almost doesn’t matter if this is deliberate sabotage by Musk or the blundering stupidity of a clueless idiot. The upshot is the same: Twitter is dying.
The value that Twitter’s platform produced, by combining valuable streams of qualification and curiosity, is being beaten and wrung out. What’s left has— for months now— felt like an echo-y shell of its former self. And it’s clear that with every freshly destructive decision— whether it’s unbanning the nazis and letting the toxicity rip, turning verification into a pay-to-play megaphone or literally banning journalists— Musk has applied his vast wealth to destroying as much of the information network’s value as possible in as short a time as possible; each decision triggering another exodus of expertise as more long-time users give up and depart.
…If you pay Musk for this meaningless mark you’ll also get increased algorithmic visibility of your tweets and the power to drown out non-paying users. Which mean all the fakes and imposters can (and will) overwrite the real-deal on Twitter.
…In a further twist, only paying users will get a vote in future Twitter policy polls — meaning Musk will guarantee populist decision-making is rigged in his fanboys’ favor. (But actually this just looks like pure trolling since he doesn’t stick to the outcome of poll results he doesn’t like anyway.)
The upshot is Musk is turning Twitter into the opposite of a meritocracy. He’s channeling pure chaos— just like the cartoon ‘chaotic evil’ villains love to. (And, well, as we’ve said before, Twitter is Musk’s calamity masterpiece.)
…That our system allows wealth to be turned into a weapon to nuke things of broad societal value is one hard lesson we should take away from the wreckage of downed turquoise feathers.
You can say shame on the Twitter board that let it happen. And we probably should. But, technically speaking, their job was to maximize shareholder value; which means to hell with the rest of us.
We should also consider how the ‘rules based order’ we’ve devised seems unable to stand up to a bully intent on replacing free access to information with paid disinformation— and how our democratic systems seem so incapable and frozen in the face of confident vandals running around spray-painting ‘freedom’ all over the walls as they burn the library down.
The simple truth is that building something valuable — whether that’s knowledge, experience or a network worth participating in — is really, really hard. But tearing it all down is piss easy.
Let that sink in.
UPDATE
Which social media platforms do Americans use? The most recent YouGov poll asked (Spoiler: MySpace lives).
Facebook- 77%
YouTube- 47%
Instagram- 44%
Twitter- 40%
LinkedIn- 27%
Pinterest- 27%
TikTok- 23%
Snapchat- 20%
Reddit- 13%
Discord- 7%
Tumblr- 5%
MySpace- 4%