Elon Musk's Twitter verification plan proves he's just winging it
Elon Musk's Twitter verification plan proves he's just winging it
Discount Tony Stark has crawled too far inside his own bubble
Welcome to another edition of Second Guess. If you missed the last week’s newsletter on attention spans and why long-form content is necessary in 2022, catch up here. Never miss another edition of the newsletter when you subscribe.
Today’s newsletter captures my thoughts on Elon Musk’s baffling Twitter verification plans. TL/DR: It’s funny watching the world’s richest man just winging it publicly with a giant, overpriced company.
Not long ago, it used to be a running joke that we couldn’t believe Twitter was free. I mean, we know Twitter’s at its best: the witty one-liners, good-natured banter, insanely satisfying clapbacks and quick-witted retorts—even the out-of-pocket insults can have you squealing in delight. As On Sunbstack puts it: it’s a wordcel’s dream.
But while we’ve spent our days and years looking at Twitter discourse as a public square, we’ve only been posturing for baying crowds for the reward of weak dopamine hits from viral engagements. And that’s been well and good, but now the app is now under the control of the world’s richest attention seeker, Elon Musk.
When Musk took over Twitter, tech publication TheVerge reported that he planned to charge $20 a month for verified users to retain their blue checkmarks. The idea was panned expansively: Even Stephen King said “Fuck that” and threatened to leave the app. Shortly after, Elon Musk’s friend, Jason Calacanis, created a Twitter poll that shows 81% of 1.9 million respondents would refuse to pay for a blue check. “Interesting,” Musk responded.
If the current verification system was opaque, inconsistent and unequal, wouldn’t the noble thing just be… making verification more accessible for free?
The next day, Musk twote (yes, twote) a thread stating that he was trying to break the “lords& peasants system” on Twitter. He also promised Twitter Blue would give “priority in replies, mentions & search, which is essential to defeat spam/scam”, the “ability to post long video & audio” and receive “half as many ads”. He also promised a paywall bypass for publishers willing to work with Twitter.
But many questions remain.
How Twitter’s verification system currently works
When Twitter launched the verification system, it had less to do with social status and more to do with instilling trust among users of the app. In 2009, Twitter was suffering from an epidemic of imposters and scam accounts. After being criticised by Kanye West and sued by Tony La Russa over fake accounts run by impersonators, the company launched its "Verified Accounts" program.
Twitter needed a way to prove that users were who they claimed to be. So the company started manually reaching out to celebrities and other notable personalities to confirm their identities and establish verified accounts for them. But it seems that was unsustainable at scale, so in 2016, Twitter announced a public application process to grant verified status to an account "if it is determined to be of public interest" with the disclaimer that verification "does not imply an endorsement".
Since then, Twitter’s process has been verifying users who are “authentic, notable and active.” Journalists, government officials, brands, and other public figures also receive the blue tick. For a while, these blue ticks verified trusted sources and provided ways for users to sift real news from misinformation, extremist propaganda, etc.
But as with all perceptions of exclusivity in human societies, for many users the blue tick quickly evolved into a vain show of status. After all, if you’re verified, it means Twitter acknowledges that it knows who you are and vouches for you.
Why Elon Musk’s plan to monetise verification is baffling
Elon Musk has never been a fan of Twitter’s user-verification system. But since taking control of the company last week, the messaging on how exactly he intends to improve the system have been confusing and contradictory.
He first proclaimed he’d charge $19.99 a month to become a verified Twitter user or retain verification status, a figure which he quickly revised to $8 after sustained pushback. But interestingly, back in 2020, Musk wrote: “Verified should be far more widespread, simply that someone is who they claim to be”.
And this claim underlines something fundamentally wrong by definition. Elon is contradicting himself. How do you claim to want to overhaul a system by demand money to sustain it? How do you think more people should be verified and then put a price tag on it while masking it as a noble move. If the current verification system was opaque, inconsistent and unequal, wouldn’t the noble thing just be… making verification more accessible for free, because y’know, you “freed the bird”?
While Musk initially slapped a $20 price tag for the blue checkarkm, he later suggested $8 instead in response to Stephen King’s criticism—and thereby missing the entire point of the argument against the fee itself.
But that’s not where the ridiculousness ends. He intends to bundle the blue tick in some convoluted way into a premium Twitter Blue that’ll also guarantee other perks. However, the relationship between Musk’s new “Blue” tier and the existing Twitter Blue service—which isn’t tied to verification, and offers features like the edit button—is unclear.
In Musk’s “Blue” though, verified users will get more “priority in replies, mentions & search, which is essential to defeat spam/scam”. How can’t anyone see that this does nothing to dismantle any “lords & peasants system”. Only, this time, since people are paying for it, their entitlement is bound to go over the roof.
Furthermore, there are currently roughly 400,000 verified accounts out of approx 450 million active users. So if you’re opening something to a much wider net of people, doesn’t it beat the whole idea of priority? How do you prioritise so many more people?
The most ridiculous of Musk’s tirade is saying that in the new dispensation, verified accounts will receive HALF AS MANY ADS. Why would anyone pay a monthly subscription and still receive ads? How does that make any lick of sense? But hold on, it gets worse.
Discount Tony Stark also promises paywall bypass for publications willing to be partners. I need someone to explain how they plan to share revenue like I’m five years old. Can you imagine Twitter first taking a cut of the $8/month per user, and then sharing, say, $5 across say, 50 partner publications per user? Is this math mathing to you? And this guy is supposed to be a genius.
The more things change, the more they remain the same
Twitter has dealt with the problem of widening the net of verified users before. In 2017, when it experimented with opening up verifications to a wider range of people, it verified Jason Kessler, a man who was responsible for the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
It’s also possible that scams could be on rise. Remember how Twitter needed the verification system almost two decades ago due to bots and imposter accounts? Widening the net of verification today may mean less stringent processes. It would be potentially easier for scammers buying up verified accounts and quickly swindling victims before they get shut down. Not like there hasn’t be such a breach before.
Why not just verify every legit user in the style of Bumble as long as they provide proof of identity? That way, there won’t be any “lord and peasant” marker.
Perhaps it could be argued that Musk could take a little bit of the old and a little bit of the new to combat this problem. He could require verificaton applicants to provide proof of identity combined with the $8 to ameliorate the problem of bots.
Then again, now that Elon Musk is reportedly slashing a huge part of Twitter’s workforce, it doesn’t instill much confidence in the company’s ability to quickly resolve violation reports especially with a significant surge in verified tweeters.
To add insult to injury, we learnt during the Elon Musk-Twitter acquisition that engagement on Twitter relies heavily on a small number of power users. I’ll take a wild guess that these are the celebrities, the top dog journalists, government officials. While the sum of money isn’t much to them in terms of elite tax, the morals of it simply doesn’t make sense.
The decision to monetise verification doesn’t erase the inequality of the pricing. What of people—majority of total users, I’d guess—who' simply can’t afford the $8 fee, even when adjusted for purchasing power parity. Again, how does that not defeat the pseudo-moral idea of equality or eliminate any class marker?
When people publish their thoughts on Twitter, they’re pretty much doing free labour for the app. Yes, we get followers and the heady feeling that attention grants us, but we can’t take these followers with us. We’re the product, advertisers are the customers. Twitter needs our engagements so it can satisfy its real customers.
Some other big social networks have deviced ways of paying their top content creators. Facebook lets you pay your favourite content creators with stars; TikTok lets you send them gifts. I hear top Twitch creators get paid too. Substack helps writers curate and grow free or paid communities with extensive network support from the company. YouTube lets creators monetise their content in addition to ads. It’s the nerve of Elon Musk to ask unpaid creators to pay fees, for me. But even more astounding is that Twitter remains among the smallest of the big social media tech companies, still very much a niche product and without any notable in-house network support for its top creators.
How then do you demand money from some of the people carrying your product? In any case, rumours have it that such engagements are gradually declining. Imposing a fee is a surefire way to push that decline into overdrive.
Some might bring an argument that paying for Twitter verification is akin to paying for LinkedIn Premium. As someone who’s both verified on twitter and has a LinkedIn premium subscription, that argument is moot. The two apps do not serve the same purpose. I drive significantly more value on LinkedIn Premium (sales navigator, InMails, company insights, LinkedIn Learning, etc) than from the Twitter blue checkmark (signalling or vanity at most).
There is simply no justification to paying for a vanity check. I’d pay Netflix $9.99 for premium entertainment and the value received is immediate. I pay for YouTube Premium to eliminate ads and stream the worlds largest collection of music. If I were to pay Twitter a monthly fee to retain my blue check, there’s simply no tangible value I would get in return.
Reading Elon Musk’s tirades on the TL as he continues to be criticised for his clownish hypotheses makes you wonder if he’s actually thought them out. There’s a reason why product teams brainstorm and discuss extensively before going public with statements.
Right now it seems he’s painfully ignorant of the workings of the company he just splashed tonnes of money on. While his confusing plans shows he doesn’t even understand his new expensive toy, it’s funny watching the world’s richest man just winging it publicly with a giant, overpriced company.
See you next Thursday evening!