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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32028 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Maybe time for a twitter-musk containment thread?

Elon Musk plans to democratize the Twitter verification badge

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587523701452464131

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/1/23435092/elon-musk-twitter-blue-verification-cost-ads-search

Elon Musk has announced that a new version of Twitter Blue will include some sort of verification accessible for $8 per month in the US, with the price “adjusted by country proportionate to purchasing power parity.” He announced the shake-up of the premium service by saying that “Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit.”

Musk also says that the service will get you:

Priority in replies, mentions, and search, which Musk argues is “essential to defeat spam/scam”

In contrast to the belief that this is bad for scammers and spammers, I think it's the opposite. Scammers, especially crypto scammers, make so much money that $8 is a steal if it means having their tweets be more visible, hence more victims. The July 2020 twitter hack stole $130k of bitcoin using verified accounts, so $8 is nothing. NFT and 'rug pull' scams not uncommonly make hundreds of thousands of dollars too. Verification is expensive and time consuming, which is how you thwart spammers, by making the costs of spam high. Verified accounts sell for $1k or more on the secondary/dark markets, way more than $8. Or you have to send in a a lot of documents proving you are authentic real person, which is time consuming with a low rate of success (some companies will help you get your Twitter account verified , but for a large fee).

'The left' , which includes a lot of journalists, celebrities, and activists, oppose this for obvious reasons. The blue checkmark is a implicit signifier of having politically approved views and being an important person.

Part of the value of verification is that it's hard to obtain. But it does dilute the value of the blue checkmark though, so this means that there will likely be two tiers of verification, with a 'super verification' for important people.

One issue is that Twitter has a weird combination of real name and username culture, and this is a definite nudge in the direction of more real name culture on Twitter. Facebook is regularly cited as evidence that real names don't prevent abuse, but they do scare off users only willing to contribute (pseudo-)anonymously. This is, of course, a recurring argument on the design of social networks.

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