Too many thoughts on the war against Twitter 'blue checks'
Unpacking the petty, public feud between journalists and tech people.
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If you’re lucky enough to sit in front of a computer or a phone all day, you might end up opening Twitter. If you’re one of those people who demands the tiny hits of dopamine you get from interacting with strangers online, you probably use Twitter a lot, maybe more than you’d care to admit to your non-Twitter friends. And if you’re one of those people, you love tweeting about current events, especially when those current events involve Twitter.
It’s been a good few weeks for OTAT (On Twitter About Twitter) content, and by good I mean bad, because chaotic neutral billionaire Elon Musk has bought Twitter. I’ve seen a lot of takes about Musk’s purchase. Liberals and leftists have been contemplating leaving the platform altogether, either because they worry about the security of their direct messages now or because Musk’s supposed friendliness to “free speech” will lead to a lot more right-wing hate speech and the reinstatement of Donald Trump’s Twitter account. Musk, himself a too-frequent user of Twitter, shared a fake news story three days after he bought the site, so maybe concerns that the platform will turn into a cesspool (er, a worse cesspool) of misinformation and bile under his stewardship.
But the primary change to Twitter we’ve been hearing about is the idea that the social network will start charging users $8 a month for “blue checks.” If you’re not on Twitter, god knows why you’ve read this far, but these checks have been provided by the social network to public figures, celebrities, media companies, and a lot of journalists who work for media companies so that they’re harder to impersonate. The basic logic is that if you see the New York Times Twitter account declare that nuclear missiles have been launched by Russia, there should be a quick and easy way to figure out if it’s the real NYT or “the N3w Y0rk T1me$.” Because a lot of media companies verified all of their employees a while ago, there are a bunch of journalists and former journalists who are hardly famous or important but have these blue checks (like me).
There doesn’t seem to be a big benefit to having the blue check. (Your replies to a tweet are displayed above other replies, I think that’s the main thing.) But there’s a whole type of guy on Twitter who seems obsessed with the idea that “blue checks” carry some weight. Like, here’s Brett Winton, who is apparently the “Chief Futurist @ARKInvest,“ which is an “Investment advisor focused solely on #disruptive #innovation,” saying that the blue check is… a knighthood or something?
@ARKInvest is a verified account, incidentally, so it seems like if Winton wanted to get the blue check he could hook that up somehow? Here’s another silly tweet that refers to a “caste whose entire status rides on that little checkmark.” What? Huh?
These tweets are usually accompanied by snide assurances that of course the Lords and Ladies of the Blue Check Court will pay $8 a month for their precious wecious status. Musk himself has tweeted stuff implying that it’s really not all that much to pay and the blue checks should stop complaining. But I don’t know man, I expect goods or services in exchange for currency.
If you pay $30 a month to LinkedIn, you get premium status that lets you find out who viewed your profile and message anyone on the platform, tools that are helpful if you are trying to get a job or hire someone, tools that are worth $30 a month to a lot of users. LinkedIn sells useful stuff, which is probably why its revenue is twice what Twitter’s is. Maybe if Musk’s team adds some more features to the blue check product it will genuinely help users get more engagement and followers…1 but then what do you do with those followers? It’s actually kind of annoying and difficult to leverage followers into revenue–maybe you can get them to sign up for your paid newsletter or YouTube channel or whatnot, but then you’re just telling people to follow you to another platform. The value of Twitter followers by themselves is pretty close to zero.
So it seems pretty bizarre that Musk and a bunch of tech-affiliated people, many of them very wealthy, are so obsessed with “blue checks,” a totally pointless signifier of very little status. But I can understand the resentment and anger at blue checks a little bit, if you break it down into a conflict essentially between journalists (a lot of whom have the blue checks) and tech people (who deride “blue checks” even when they themselves have them).
Journalists by nature are skeptical. Good journalism means asking inconvenient questions, poking holes in things, pointing out when endeavors fail and uncovering truths famous people or institutions would rather keep hidden. In some cases, journalists have brought down entire companies, including tech-adjacent ones, like Theranos. In other cases, journalists have questioned the wisdom of tech companies’ big, ambitious projects, like the Metaverse2.
I know less about tech people. But they strike me as fundamentally optimistic, blue-sky thinkers who throw out big ideas knowing that most of them will fail but if one succeeds, it could change the world. Guys like Musk and Jeff Bezos seem genuinely committed to colonizing space and Mars and have spent money trying to achieve that goal–as a skeptical journalist, I don’t think that’s a great idea, but they’re trying stuff. And I can see that it would be annoying for these types to have journalists constantly buzzing around asking questions, sometimes directly reaching out to your communication departments, but sometimes just saying mean things on the social network you share with them. Can’t they see what I’m trying to build here? Why are they so negative?
My advice to journalists is going to be boring and everyone will hate it, but honestly I think a lot of them should be a little more professional and buttoned-up when they tweet about the industries and people they cover. I see some tech journalists tweeting about how much they think the tech industry sucks, and it’s not that I don’t often agree, but there’s value in keeping your opinions to yourself sometimes and cultivating a layer of respectability.
My advice to tech people is to grow a thicker skin. Journalists cover every industry in ways that their subjects find harsh and unfair. (Just ask anyone who works for a Philadelphia-area sports team.) The only way to deal with journalists is to ignore us; we feed on attention the way fruit flies feed on apple cider vinegar. But tech people are not just annoyed that anyone takes journalists seriously, they themselves also take journalists way too seriously. Tech people are notorious at not being able to tune out the news. The one time I ever published a story that mentioned any of Musk’s companies, I had to endure an extremely tedious and silly off-the-record conversation with one of his communications people. For someone who apparently enjoys posting online, Musk gets maaaaaAAAAAAAAdd about stuff. That probably explains why he’s tweeting constantly about this weird pay-to-verify–it must burn him up that so many journalists are mocking it and calling him clueless. What have these losers ever done besides get a humanities degree?
Maybe a lot of liberals and journalists who dislike Musk will follow through and bail on Twitter. Maybe there will be a fundamental change in how the site looks or feels. Maybe you’ll have to pay to get anything resembling a good user experience–in which case everyone will probably go get their dopamine hits elsewhere. But not matter what tweaks Musk makes, he’s not going to get those annoying journalists to like him. At this point, it seems like it’d be easier for him to fly to Mars.
Currently you can pay $5 a month for something called “Twitter Blue,” which comes with a fairly limited number of features. I can’t emphasize enough how little anyone cares about Twitter Blue.
I’ve seen an argument that the New York Times in particular has been adversarial when it comes to covering Silicon Valley. I don’t know about that, but it’s true the Times has drawn a lot of criticism from techies for doing things like unmasking the guy running the Slate Star Codex blog.