Twitter CEO reveals the guy who issues coveted blue checkmarks, and the guy is not happy about it

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/16/twitter-ceo-reveals-the-guy-wh.html

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Some Twitter users – especially trolls, racists, misogynists, and fascists –

Hey, thanks for the update, and validating why I won’t touch Twitter with a ten foot pole.

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Rob: don’t try anything.

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This checks out.

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The Daily Dot reached out to Beykpour over Twitter to inquire about his newly appointed title as verification god but did not receive a response by publication time.

Perfect.

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Comments are often the worst part of a web site. Twitter is all comments no content.

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So did Kayvon give his check mark to himself? If so, does that prove it’s worthlessness?

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I don’t know about the comments, but the replies are definitely the worst part of this website!

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Dorsey looks somewhere between Kaczynski and that episode of the Simpsons where Burns goes full Howard Hughes.

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Love the metaphor.

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Yet more proof that Twitter and “social media” in general is idiotic claptrap. Platforms for idiotic monkey chatter by attention whores and emotional damage cases.

It feels like you can really only define a Blue Checkmark in the negative. It essentially means that Twitter is pretty sure you’re not actively impersonating someone.

Trying to define it in the positive leads down a bizarre rabbit hole: "You are who [you say you are?] [your profile picture depicts?] [you present yourself as on Twitter?] What does it mean to be a specific person on Twitter, as opposed to someone else? For public figures, you can easily say, “these Tweets come from the person I saw in that movie” (for certain values of “this,” I mean what if it’s their personal assistant actually tweeting?) or for IRL acquaintances: “these are the expressions of the Todd I went to elementary school with, I think.”

But the nature of Twitter means you can be as deeply connected to your actual life or not on Twitter as you want. If you don’t reveal or ingrain anything about your IRL self on Twitter, what does any of it matter, what is the essential connection between these brain-farts and identity?

Oof, fuck you Twitter, I have better things to puzzle about.

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So Jack Dorsey says Kayvon is the Verification God, but Kayvon says Jack is wrong? Sounds like the Verification God is as mysterious as all the other gods.

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That’s an extremely narrow sense of online human interaction.

(I spend more time on Twitter reporting nazis and other hateful folk than actually using it for myself, but even I wouldn’t go as far to say this.)

Social media is a broadcast point, a way for people who make things to share them with a potentially larger audience (some forms, like Facebook, allows you to build and maintain an audience and then removes access once you’ve done all the work yourself, something which—so far—twitter has not yet done).

You can’t find content* on Twitter? Really?

(* There is art, and artists, science, and scientists, and writing, and writists. Most of those I follow don’t have checked accounts, so, it’s really about who you know, or I guess, who you don’t.)

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i was wondering if that guy was going to get deluged. i know i thought about trying to contact him to get a blue checkmark for me.

in my experience on twitter, the only people who find it an awful cesspool are either celebs (but not all of them!), because they attract such huge numbers of followers, casual users, or people who have never used it. everyone else i know who uses it and finds it useful knows how to liberally apply the “mute,” “block,” and “report” features to control things, and to me it’s a funny, informative place.

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Yet, here you are.

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With a boss like that, who needs enemies?

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Yeah. If I had to work for Twitter, I would keep my account an absolute secret.

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If Jack just made such an obvious blunder in this video, maybe we will get an edit button soon!