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Notes -
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
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.
See, the thing I've been seeing about the blue checkmark is a lot of poorly-disguised sneering about "all it means is that the person's identity is verified (you clods who claim it's people with outsized influence being quoted as Gospel on progressive issues)".
That's all it is, and so it doesn't mean they get special treatment or quoted as authorities or anything. Just a means of verifying identity.
So that makes all the crying over "why should we have to pay for this?" sound hypocritical to me. Why do you want or need a blue checkmark? "So I know Professor Doctor Eat The Horse Paste is a trusted and reputable authority, instead of an unverified Doctor Professor Eat The Horse Paste!"
No, it's because you want to retweet and quote "ackshully The Science Says, you bigots, and here's a Real Scientist saying that there is no biological basis for sex".
If you want archaeologists and anthropologists to label skeletons as "who knows what this body was in life, they could have been a Brave and Stunning Valid Real Woman?", because forensic anthropology does not exist and there is no way to differentiate between a male or female skeleton so this six thousand year old set of dead bones could be trans you bigots, then you can damn well pay for the privilege of getting to finger-wag and lecture on social media as An Expert.
I get to shoot my mouth off on here for free, and nobody has to pay a straw's worth of attention to me. If you want to point to your blue check mark as "This is why you should take me seriously", then you can stump up for the licence to demand attention and credulity.
I actually found the link interesting. Skeleton from the Corded Ware Bronze Age culture that was biologically male but buried in female tradition. (Head facing west, surrounded by jugs instead of weapons.)
They also point out rightly in the article that burial practices were incredibly strict and not something ancient cultures would change lightly. There are of course many other explanations and jumping to the idea that it’s trans for fame is a poor call, but it’s not the worst woke science I’ve seen by a long shot.
Yeah but question becomes exactly what the associated cultural rituals were.
It's one thing if the person opted into it of their own freewill/preference, but there's sufficient quasi-Eunuch 'trans' traditions that I wouldn't really consider to be anything like modern conceptions of free sexual identification
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