Why, hello there, it’s been a minute. Welcome back to The Friday Post on Trauma Response, for those of you who have forgotten me, it’s me, Holden. This past week I was in a funk and the only thing that seemed to be happening in the news was the slow and meandering breakdown of Kanye West’s career and psyche. I tried my hardest to write about Kanye, an artist that I have no real affinity for aside from a couple of songs, but, try as I might, my main thesis was “Stop talking about Kanye, I don’t care about Kanye,” and that’s hard to write 1000+ words about.
Today is a new day, this week is a new week, and my funk is no more. As I’m sure many of you are aware by now, billionaire Elon Reeve Musk has recently purchased Twitter, to many people’s chagrin. After months of pussyfooting around his proposed acquisition in April, Musk has finally put his money where his mouth is and bought my favorite social media platform. In the days since his purchase, Musk has fired most of the executive staff, allegedly told the remaining staff to work 84-hour work weeks, and promised to reinstate banned accounts, vowing to make Twitter a bastion of free speech. From the start many people were upset, but as the days pass by and Elon Musk tweets out his ideas in a bizarre stream-of-consciousness style reminiscent of a child talking about what he wants for Christmas, the thing that seems to be drawing the most ire is Musk’s idea to allow the Twitter Verified Badge to be bought on a subscription basis for $8 (or $20, it’s a bit fuzzy) a month. Let’s talk about it.
The Twitter Verified Badge is a staple of Twitter and has been copied by almost every other social media company around (or maybe Instagram had it first, I don’t really care). The small light blue checkmark sits next to the names of celebrities or influencers or people just well-known enough to qualify for it so that you, the peons of Twitter, know that this person with the checkmark is the real deal. There can be a million different accounts pretending to be Joe Biden, maybe one of them is in your DMs right now asking for campaign donations via your PayPal account information, but the real Joe Biden is the one with the blue check. It serves a simple enough function, a light through the tunnel of liars, scammers, and fan accounts, and Elon Musk seemingly wants to upend that.
Twitter Blue, is a relatively new “premium,” subscription-based, version of Twitter that anyone can opt into, given they want to fork over $4.99 to Twitter once a month. No one I know uses Twitter Blue, and I doubt many professionals use it either, it doesn’t offer enough new features to seem worthwhile, and people, in general, don’t like paying for things they can get for free. Elon Musk, on the other hand, sees Twitter Blue as an untapped source of income and on November 1st tweeted, “Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit. Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.” Seeking to sweeten the deal of Twitter Blue and acquire more subscribers, Musk intends to give a verified badge to anyone who pays $8 a month. What could possibly go wrong?
If Musk’s Twitter Verified Badge plan goes as he wants it to, which it seems like it probably will, problems will most likely arise not soon after. The entire premise of the Verified Badge requires exclusivity, you have to petition Twitter yourself and qualify for verification. If any random person with $8 to spare can get verified as easy as pie, then the Verification Badge has lost all of its meaning. Musk himself is what some would call a “free speech absolutist,” meaning he believes in free speech regardless of context or circumstance, so it’s easy to see how his free speech ethos combined with the power and “status” of a Twitter Verified Badge wielded by a complete moron could lead to trouble. Soon we may have 1000 different accounts claiming to be CNN spreading misinformation, or fake Joe Biden accounts trying to get our PayPal information for fake campaign donations, and it will be harder to know who is real and who is fake.
On the other hand, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, I don’t necessarily disagree with Elon’s sentiments regarding the Twitter Verified Badge. In theory, the Verified Badge is there as proof of legitimacy, but in practice, it is more of a status symbol. Anyone with a few thousand followers (or even less, frankly) who has written an article for Buzzfeed or New York Magazine can petition Twitter to verify them. That one guy who went viral in 2017 for begging Wendy’s for free chicken nuggets for a year is verified, and his last tweet got one like, no one is checking in on Carter Wilkerson, and I wouldn’t know him from a can of paint. The idea that the Verified Badge holds any meaning when the most random and, no offense, middling people can attain it is bogus.
But even for all his talk of “free speech” and “lords and peasants,” Elon Musk just wants your money. He overpaid for Twitter with money he doesn’t even really have. If Twitter underperforms then Tesla will be affected, and then the perfect digital wasteland he’s built up in his head will all come crumbling down. While I agree with him that the Verified Badge as it is today is pretty stupid, his “noble” reasons for giving it to anyone who pays for it are nothing but a pathetic quest for an easy buck.
Twitter has never been the perfect platform, it’s filled with total idiots from all over the political spectrum, it bans accounts seemingly at random while preserving accounts that have done far worse, hell, it was even used as an ISIS recruitment tool back in the day. But no social media platform is the “perfect” social media platform. Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Tumblr, and even LinkedIn are all public companies seeking to profit. The owners and executives at Twitter have never cared about your individual experience on their platform, Jack Dorsey didn’t care if you were “having fun” or “feeling good” on Twitter, and I’m sure at the end of the day Elon Musk won’t either, he just cares that you’re on Twitter.
I doubt this will be Musk’s only change for Twitter in the hopes of turning a profit, I don’t even think this will be the only change he’ll institute for financial reasons that have the potential to render the website borderline unusable. I said earlier that Elon Musk’s Twitter account reminds me of a child, and frankly that’s what I think of the man himself. Elon Musk is a total idiot who has never owned a social media company before, shouldn’t have bought one to begin with, and probably won’t turn as big of a profit as he needs to when this is all said and done.
Welcome back!❤