In late 2022, long before multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk renamed Twitter to X, rumors swirled that he was getting ready to shake up the platform's verification system.
His proposal: charge each subscriber for the privilege of being verified without ever doing the homework of actually verifying their identity — a short-sighted and ultimately disastrous decision that Musk reportedly regretted almost immediately.
As detailed in an upcoming book titled "Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter," reporters Ryan Mac and Kate Conger lay out in detail how Musk's blue checkmark scheme, called Twitter Blue, collapsed in on itself and compounded the company's financial crisis. (The pair recently published a story adapted from their new book in the New York Times.)
The 2022 US midterm elections took place on November 8, a day before Musk started charging users for a blue checkmark.
When the switch was made, all hell broke loose, with countless newly verified accounts masquerading as politicians, celebrities, and companies. One account parading as Nintendo shared a viral image of Super Mario giving the finger.
Advertisers, who had gotten wind of the mayhem, started reaching out to Twitter's sales teams, threatening to pull their ads. According to Mac and Conger's sources, Nike executives threatened to never advertise on the platform again.
And Musk was terrified of the prospect of losing hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising revenue.
"Turn it off," he reportedly told an engineer. "Turn it off!"
Twitter Blue, a $8-a-month subscription service, was unlikely to stem all the bleeding. The company was already dealing with considerable debt. Musk had to borrow around $13 billion for his doomed $44 billion acquisition.
And business hasn't exactly looked up since Twitter Blue launched just under two years ago. Even more advertisers have abandoned the platform over Musk's failure to reign in a tidal wave of disinformation and hate speech — something he's been actively contributing to himself.
Just last week, the Wall Street Journal called the acquisition the "worst buyout for banks since the financial crisis," with banks unable to offload their debt without incurring major losses.
Musk has bounced back and forth between telling advertisers to literally "fuck" themselves and begging them to return. Earlier this month, Musk sued a global advertising alliance out of existence, accusing it of conspiring against him.
Twitter has also gone through several rounds of mass layoffs, with Musk imploring them to come back weeks later.
In short, Musk's ill-informed takeover has left a major hole in his reputation as a successful entrepreneur. His incompetency when it comes to running a social media platform has been on full display.
Meanwhile, X-formerly-Twitter is still rife with impersonators and scammers taking advantage of Musk's poorly thought-out Twitter Blue scheme.
And engineers could only helplessly watch as the billionaire brought down the walls around them.
"It was such an obvious train wreck, that the main job of everyone on the team was to make sure it was the safest train wreck possible," one Blue worker wrote in a journal, as quoted by Mac and Conger.
I'm so happy I never got a Twitter account. I never have and I never well. I get to hear horror stories and comedies from folks like from our beloved UlyssesT power poster extraordinaire (and annoying podcasters of various stripes and backgrounds, it's crazy how every podcast I listen into has a Twitter report section of some sort these days). It's also deeply not funny and genuinely upsetting how tech companies and platforms have so much unearned and undue sway on global communications. It's cliche to say but it's straight out of a 90's cyberpunk graphic novel how these companies just loudly and increasingly stupid ways control how we talk online.
I make sure never to directly link to Le Epic X Dot Com The Everything App Of Free Speech (but don't you dare say "cis!") and borrow screenshots instead whenever possible from a third party.
I was there when the social engineering really became blatant before it became so commonplace that we stopped noticing it.
It started in the 90s for me with talking heads on network news needing to have water bottles present at all times when talking and to talk about how important it was to stay hyrated with EHCH TWO OOOH at all times and to make MMMMM lip smacking sounds while imprinting their insatiable craving for a Tall Vente Frappucino Mocha from this quaint place called Starbucks(tm).
Social networks were astroturfed into both importance and mandatory performative presence, with loaded articles in newsrags saying stuff like "WE ALL ARE ON FACEBOOK NOW. ISN'T THAT SOMETHING?!" or putting the Zucc's fish-eyed pale and oily stare across the entire width of a TIME magazine cover.
Sometimes astroturfing feels so blatant that I can smell the petrochemicals, like when some new celebrity is coronated out of fucking nowhere and they become famous because they are famous, or when a product is explosively overmarketed and sometimes fizzles no matter what the hype wave claimed it was going to be. That happened particularly with multiple waves of VR/glasshole hype, complete with SEO faces of awe and wonder presented on every fucking image tied to such propaganda.
Truly the hero this site needs. Thank you for your service.
. Also excellent use of Elrond.
Also holup, you can't say CIS? like cisgendered? For real?
Exactly dude. Fuckin' exactly!!! You can waft in that fresh manufactured consent. Some days I feel like a geezer but the NET (not just social media which people often confuse with the internet as a whole) has been radically astroturfed
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It's now a meme of its own, yes. Le Epic X Dot Com The Everything App Of Free Speech instantly and automatically bans people for saying "cis." It's such a clownishly glaring contradiction to the false promises (and not worthwhile anyway, because of how nazis and kiddie creepers immediately leap upon "free speech" pretenses to do their usual) that Le Epic Dot Com The Everything App Of Free Speech makes, but like so many of E~L~O~N's lies, it's just sort of nodded to by the credulous rubes anyway.