Without Verification, What Is the Point of Elon Musk’s Twitter?

Elon Musk's Twitter fundamentally misunderstands what made Twitter useful in the first place. In an attempt to wring blood from a stone, Twitter’s announced that all the original "blue checks"—initially created as a way to verify that someone was who they said they were—will disappear on April 1st. Instead, blue checks will once again be for sale, just as they were briefly, when Musk took control. April 1 is a date that makes it hard to take anything seriously but, since this isn’t the first time Twitter’s tried this, let's delve into the problems that selling verifications poses. 

Twitter used to do a better job of content moderation than many of its social media competitors. The company tended to err on the side of labeling objectionable content rather than removing it. Twitter had an admirable commitment to transparency and standing up for its users (that isn't to say it was good: content moderation at scale almost never turns out well. It simply had smarter failures than the rest). 

Twitter’s good qualities—features and practices that many users all over the world came to rely on—are all but gone now. 

Twitter Before

Twitter first introduced blue checkmarks in 2009, after celebrities complained of being impersonated on the platform. While verification was only available to well-known public figures (e.g. actors, athletes, politicians) at first, checkmarks were later rolled out to companies, journalists, activists, and even social media influencers. In 2016, the company briefly rolled out a verification application process, so individuals who could prove their notability could get verified. That process was shut down after a white supremacist was verified through it, and wasn’t reopened until late 2020, with tighter qualifications.

Although the specifics of Twitter’s verification procedures were often criticized, the blue checkmarks served an important function: verifying that a person or company was exactly who they said they were. It's partially what made Twitter so beloved by journalists: it was harder to accidentally include a tweet by a joke account in your reporting. It also saved a lot of journalists from hunting down an email address or a public relations person when they wanted to contact someone—far easier to just send a DM. Furthermore, journalists with the checkmarks were clearly also who they said they were, making it more likely they'd get responses from subjects who could tell that they were legitimate reporters. 

It was also an alternative to, say, Facebook's real name policy, which is a source of constant difficulty, pain, and danger for people with serious reasons for not wanting their names attached to their posts. A checkmark lets people choose to participate under their “real names,” while also giving other users the ability to decide if they want to trust a non-verified person.

Twitter was one the few platforms left that let you default to a chronological feed of accounts that you followed. Twitter added context to its list of trending topics, going a long way towards addressing the common panic on seeing someone’s name as a “trending topic” and assuming they had died when, in fact, it was just their birthday. It also added some context to unhelpfully broad trending topics—for example, these days, "Californians" is often listed under "trending in California." Alone, it tells you nothing of value. That, too, is gone. 

Twitter also used to have a notation informing you which tool was used to publish each tweet. This lets savvy users make reliable inferences about which tweets were pre-planned, which were sent by an aide, and which originated with the person whose name was on the account—a very useful feature for reporting based on tweets. 

Twitter also occasionally fact-checked items that were gaining traction, adding context and more information to a tweet. Once again, counterspeech is preferable to removing content most of the time. 

One of the few content moderation innovations that remains intact on Twitter is the feature that pops up a dialog box asking if you've read an article before you can share it.  This was added to curb mis- and disinformation. Perhaps most of us are so desensitized to pop-ups we don't even notice, but it's still a good step to add a little friction to otherwise mindlessly shared links. 

All these things added value to Twitter as a service—but as valuable as they are, none of them are mo