Selling blue ticks doesn’t mean only true celebs will have them it will mean every idiot with a youtube channel and a hundred dollars will have a blue tick.
He is going to be sad when he bankrupts the company because he enjoys tweeting to his sycophantic fans and being a troll so much.
He’s not going to make back his $44 billion on celebs who want blue check verification.
I’m guessing he doesn’t just plan to force notable people to pay for the verification check. If he is going to use it as part of the algorithm that determines who is a real user or a bot, he will likely push this feature out to everyone or at the very least, everyone who uses the site as part of their work/job.
If we can somehow recruit dril to this website that would solve a lot of problems.
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA 
Sticks and Stones can break my bones, but words can start a pogrom
I like bots. I follow bots. Most of the really offensive and horrible accounts are burners, not bots.
They know you are going to report them, they know they will get banned, but they know that the families of victims (say) will have had the opportunity to see horrible things said about their loved one and they know it will be long after their burner account is useful to them before it will get banned.
Also: someone’s pointed out that if you pay for blue ticks they will become the must have for trolley farms, misinformation superspreaders, and wannabes and absolutely useless for the kinds of people who otherwise benefit from blue ticks?
Because if they haven’t it needs to be said.
People can express themselves in all kinds of horrible ways with or without Twitter. But when Twitter makes a conscious choice to provide a platform for misinformation and hate speech then they are complicit in the harm caused by said speech.
Now that’s a rational take on all of social media.
This right here is just another public viewing of someone who is not right in the head.
I mean, seriously. Why TF would this hump want to even buy Twitter? It’s like watching a 12 year old have a tantrum.
I remember an age where we didn’t even know who the CEOs of companies were. Because who gives a shit. Just make your stuff and fucking do it right.
Some time in the last several decades came the emergence of the CEO as celebrity. So fucking annoying.
Someone said “twitter elite”. That’s funny.
Ummm, lots of us do. Because we don’t want to become a profit engine for evil fuckers. The only difference is that now we sometimes have options.
I think it’s easier not to care if you are not a member (or ally) of one of the groups that will be penalized for existing once these folks gain more power. Which, in the US and some other places, is now.
I wonder what he plans to do when Section 230 gets repealed? Or has he not looked that far ahead?
One of the things I absolutely love about the corners of the internet I’ve ended up in is finding people who make the same joke at the same time. Bless happy mutants.
It seems like Musk has done an inadvertently masterful job threading the verification tax through more or less all the potentially favorable zones to land it somewhere that will appeal to nobody:
If you wanted to treat a supply of authentic and competent people as a feature of the platform that attracts others you’d want ‘verifed’ to cost nothing but have comparatively steep requirements in terms of notability or long-term positive contribution; or extensive expertise or some combination of the above.
If you want verification to be an anti-bot/anti-sockpuppet mechanism having a mechanism that says “the presence of this account is worth actual money to someone” probably isn’t the worst possible method; but you’d want to make a clean break with any vestiges of the idea that it’s a notability-linked thing; and use a different description (‘subscriber’ or something) that makes it clear that it’s purely a statement of willingness to pay.
If you want it to be a status symbol you effectively face the choice of either pricing it so low that it immediately loses all status; or so high that the vast majority of the formerly-verified give you the finger and walk.
As it is, the result appears to be something that’s still too tied to the old notions of notability to be treated as an anti-bot buy-in signaling mechanism; far too cheap to be prestigious; too expensive to avoid upsetting the (one suspects somewhat valuable) people who are willing to do rather a lot of hands-on work for you for free, in terms of shoveling competent content into the mill; but will be insulted by the idea of paying you outright for your little pat on the back; and not coupled to any obvious quality-of-life type features that might attract people on their own.
While I do give a shit about who the CEO is at a given company or about the internal corporate culture, I’ll agree with the idea that I’d just as soon not have them achieve celebrity status for doing nothing except exploiting people out of billions of dollars. I swear I think they get away with even more of that now that they’ve reached this status because people will dismiss the negatives after reading that idiotic tweet where said Celebrity Executive Officer “owned the libs.”
Tbf, this is only true for certain industries (and for one country). I couldn’t tell you who the CEOs of BASF, Maersk or BP are, although those companies are arguably as or more important to modern society than the Musks and Bezos’ of this world.
Most Muricans are just temporarily embarrassed CEOs.
Indeed. It’s called laziness.
