You don’t have to be a Twitter user to have taken an interest in the very public fiasco that began when Elon Musk made a bid to purchase the social media company. The buyout became official on October 27th, 2022 and the second week of November saw sweeping changes to revenue streams, basic functions, verification, and the executive structure. I have been fascinated by the whole thing just from a business and philosophy standpoint but, as a user, I have a vested interest. Be warned, this is much longer than I anticipated it would be.
What it’s been like watching Twitter sink, from the User Level
I am not pretending to be a tech or business writer, so there are certain things I may not grasp. I have, however, had a Twitter account for 10 years and I have seen it change quite a bit in that time. It was only within the last few years that using the site became an everyday utility, but it proved to be a useful outlet when the Covid-19 pandemic pushed me to look for a surogate social community.
For someone like myself, who had a website I wanted to promote (and podcast that would come later), Twitter was a great way to connect with others who had similar interests in film, sports, or music, and to actually (on occasion) interact with professionals in those fields. I even started The Sheist International Film Club, exclusively on Twitter, that operated within its group chat and Twitter space features and has members in the US, Canada, Kenya, Britain, and Scotland. It was perfect for that kind of stuff and where I found most of the site’s value.
Twitter was also a great place of information from reliable sources that had been thoroughly vetted. Of course, there was plenty of misinformation being spewed on the platform as well, but seeing a blue verification badge with a white check mark used to have actual value. Whether or not you chose to interact, seeing that symbol meant the account had at least gone through the proper channels of accreditation (it had even become a mainstay crutch of traditional media outlets that had gotten incredibly lazy and started sharing tweets in place of actual news). That’s all changed now too and in the worst possible way.
Musk’s blustering proclamations about freedom of speech and protecting Twitter as a public town square almost immediately gave way to profit motive as he announced that verified Twitter accounts would have to pay $20/month to retain their status. This was the first public sign that he seemed to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the company he bought for $44-billion.
Author Stephen King rightfully told him to shove it because it’s King’s name and presence on the platform, as a verified user, that give Twitter its value, not the other way around. It was never about whether or not King can afford the monthly cost, it’s about whether or not he and other “notable” government, news, and entertainment content providers should pay. Most, if not all, other social media platforms pay their content creators, so why did Musk decide to draw this particular line in the sand?
The public spat left Elon looking a bit foolish and licking his wounds but he would go on to readjust and releverage his position to an $8/month fee for verification status, so at least he learned something and applied that knowledge. However, he seemed to take it personally as he took aim at legacy verified accounts, meaning ones like King’s that had been deemed to be notable enough to make it through the vetting process, before the new fee structure went into place. Musk has claimed it’s part of his plan to do away with Twitter’s “lords” and “peasants” system, but once again seemed to misinterpret Twitter at its core and defy his own words regarding that stance in the process.
Twitter Blue had existed before Musk took the reigns, but (mostly) nobody was using it because the ability to edit a tweet didn’t provide enough utility to make it valuable. It would only be useful to large entities with big interaction pools that needed to fix a typo or update an existing tweet with new information but, even so, that’s not the majority of the user base. So, Musk opened up access to the blue verification badges with promises of preferential treatment for anyone willing to pony up the $8 dollars monthly. Creating a pay-to-play system didn’t just not fix the class system he publicly decried, it actually created a brand new one that wasn’t there to begin with.
He must have been reading Dr. Suess during the acquisition because he Starbelly Sneetched the hell out of Twitter. Musk, after all, is a salesman and he new full well that there were plenty of accounts who only wished they would get big enough to one day earn that verified status. I myself had wondered how much work and credibility I would have to earn in order to achieve it. Well, as it turns out, Musk’s answer was zero. Literally anybody who’s willing to pay $8/month can have the appearance of status on the site. The problem is that this system completely undermined the value of the verified status in a dangerous way.
*Quick aside: If you are unfamiliar with the Sneetches, the ones who didn’t have stars on their bellies paid to have stars put on. However, the ones with preexisting stars didn’t like the idea that any Sneetch with a few bucks could just buy their way into the star-bellied club. So, they had their stars removed. Ultimately, there’s one businessman at the center who operates the machines for both the application and removal of those stars and makes a shit ton of money off of both sides while they squabble. In the end, the Sneetches are all broke but they learn not to discrimate based on special status. So how is that working out on Twitter?
In fairness, I completely understand small-to-medium sized accounts that are happy to pay the $8/month. In a vacuum, that price tag isn’t really cost-prohibitive and I know many accounts that have been grinding for years just to get a few thousand followers, so a small fee to make their content more visible isn’t that bad. It’s principle more than anything and the whole “town square” vibe goes away when you are making people pay to have their voices heard equally.
There are, of course, other drawbacks to this new system. For example, I spent a lot of time and energy creating a movie-based guessing game and building that through genuine interaction, but it needs interactions to thrive and I’ve noticed that number has plummeted recently. My own timeline has become increasingly painful to navigate as many of the accounts within the same niches (namely fantasy football and mixed martial accounts) have made the jump to “verified” while many others have had their tweets suppressed or left Twitter altogether. That essentially leaves perpetual, glorified ad space comprised of pay-to-play posts and an increasing number of traditional ads that have always been annoying. If it’s happening to me, it’s happening to others.
It is a little unclear whether that was his intent all along or whether his first days at the helm changed his opinion, but he’s doing the exact opposite of what he vocalized and it’s blowing up in his face in hilarious fashion with numerous parody accounts of public figures/entities, including Musk himself. He responded in the childish manner we’ve become accustomed to, permanently suspending such accounts, most notably comedian Kathy Griffin who used her account to parody the billionaire. But there’s a reason for the saying, “the internet is undefeated” (see video below).
Griffin’s celebrity status surely made it all more public, but it was far from just her. Hundreds, if not thousands, of accounts were more than happy to eat the $8 just to have some fun poking holes in the eccentric billionaire’s poorly thought out idea. Whether that was parodies of prominent sports reporters breaking fake news stories, politicians, a slew of phony Musks, or my personal favorite from today the founding father himself, George Washington (who has since had their verification removed) back from the grave. Most of that was in the name of humor, which I appreciate, but that was only the tip of the paid verification iceberg.
There’s was a story I was waiting to hear more about that’s now made it’s way to all the major news sources. An account that paid for Twitter Blue created a phony page for pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and sent out a tweet stating that they would be making insulin free. Then there was a massive dip in their stock worth tens of billions of dollars. It may not have been the direct cause in their stock dip, but it did prompt Eli Lilly to issue an apology statement and remind folks of their official account. On the one hand, I have no love lost for big pharma, so someone pulling a Robin Hood like joke at their expense doesn’t bother me. On the other hand, if that fake tweet was directly responsible for the price drop, it highlights the frighteningly real consequences of this new “verification” system.
There were also the reports of Musk making Twitter engineers print out hard copies of the site’s code so that he could show it to his Tesla engineers…like that even makes sense at all. Tesla isn’t a social media company. What kind of immature prick-waving nonsense is that? Anyway, all of this is going on while Musk held meetings with advertisers trying to reassure them about hatespeech concerns. In that same meeting he shared his views that the majority of the platform users’ posts would be treated like “spam” and relegated to a separate section. What was that about wanting to eliminate the class system he thought was a threat?
Musk’s initial plan, I thought, was to make Twitter a bastion of free speech with less of a supposed “liberal bias”, even though Twitter’s own internal surveys speak to the opposite, but his hubris seems to know no bounds. He somehow thought it was a good idea to host a public space, that was recorded, where he laid out exactly why advertisers and unpaid users would and should want to leave the platform. All of that is pretty bad, but it’s not even the most alarming stuff. After that meeting, the dominoes really began to fall as internal memos came to light highlighting massive security and privacy concerns.
The reason I know I can trust and share Brianna and Casey’s stuff is because they are legacy verified users who had to earn that status the hard way. I checked. But I also shouldn’t have to click through three times on their profile just to distinguish a hard-working journalist from a random person with $8. So, coincidentally, it’s a fantastic example of why there should be, at the very least, some obvious visual distinction between truly vetted “verified” accounts and accounts with paid badges. A green checkmark for those who paid would be easy enough, but it doesn’t match the whole “Twitter Blue” identity. What do I know? Although, I have had some laughs with these (below).
*Update: If you have made it this far, thank you. I began information gathering and forming my ideas on Thursday and put virtual pen to paper on Friday, taking primary aim at this new bogus verification process. As things continued to unfold, the flaws became way too big to ignore and the new Twitter Blue was halted.
When a bunch of senior executives walk away from the company in the wake of everything Musk is doing, there’s no way to look at that like good news. Those folks are trying to preserve whatever industry equity they have left and I don’t blame them for abandoning ship. You’d have to imagine those are some lucrative positions they left behind too, and that’s very telling. He had also fired a number of engineers upon completion of his takeover, so that makes the FTC privacy concerns even more glaring as an influx of new payments hits the platform.
If I remember correctly, back in the Spring of 2022 Musk made comments in favor of end-to-end encryption of private messages on Twitter that coincided with a ruling from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals regarding was a criminal case where a conviction was upheld because the court ruled that the search and seizure of private message through Yahoo and Facebook were constitutional seizures. Due to the nature of that case, it felt like an “ends justify the means” situation but also like a big blow to broader privacy rights.
Put another way, the Ninth Circuit seems to conclude that a private entity’s contract-drafting decisions can make your constitutional privacy rights online disappear. This decision is clearly wrong. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Jen Lynch pointed out, many courts (including the Supreme Court) have held that “digital content you store with a third party is protected by the Fourth Amendment,” so a third party’s TOS “cannot vitiate your Fourth Amendment rights.”
As I wrote recently, “you have no Fourth Amendment rights online anyway” has sometimes been the position of the Justice Department and even members of Congress. Now, if Rosenow stands, it looks like that’s the law of the land in the Ninth Circuit—which, because it includes Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, and the Seattle area, covers many major tech and entertainment companies’ headquarters (i.e., the place where the government serves legal demands for user data). All thanks to a single flimsy paragraph. Kerr is right: The users of online services—i.e., basically everybody—should be freaked out by this ruling.
Riana Pfefferkorn, Tech Stream (Brookings)
Now that he’s actually in control, it has to be alarming to users, investors, and advertisers to see reports of high ranking executives fleeing the company due specifically to privacy concerns. End-to-end encryption may be on the way, but as it stands, it’s just another example of Musk saying one thing and then doing the opposite. Tracking user data and selling it to marketers isn’t new, but you should always be careful who you give your financial information to. It has become increasingly clear that Twitter’s push to turn to a subscription based model may, in fact, be putting your information at even greater risk than usuak. The platform is not the same as it was a couple of weeks ago. Hell, it’s not even the same as it was just a few days ago.
I can’t say that I know what being “hardcore” means in this sense and if Elon had a more unifying vision of what that means, he would have said that instead. At least you would hope. For the employees who didn’t have the leverage to walk away, they are stuck in an undesirable position. A lawyer within the organization cited FTC violations and suggested that concerned employees should be seeking whistleblower protection. Uhhhh…that’s not good.
As one lawyer is telling their colleagues to protect themselves, legally, Musk’s personal lawyer attempted to douse the flames by issuing another email to Twitter employees trying to quiet concerns over whether Twitter may already be in violation of the FTC’s consent decree that was already in place regarding neglecting the protection of user data.
I have already laid out a number of issues that all warrant legitimate unease, but beyond all of those flagrant issues, there’s the big bad wolf lurking in the shadows and his name is bankruptcy. Imagine your boss not only telling you that your company is on the verge of bankruptcy but having your boss’s lawyer tell you via email that as long as you do what the boss says, you won’t have to worry about facing legal action at the hands of the FTC. Talk about putting out fires with gasoline.
As this story continues to unfold, there is going to be a lot of new information coming to light and I will not be a good source for that. Although, I will likely be retweeting anything I find interesting. I don’t know if Casey is currently up to date, but he did provide a great timeline of events for anyone who is interested.
I am going to try to detach from the situation over the weekend, but I already had to suspend our Film Club event due to a sudden lack of participation. Whether or not that is directly related to Twitter’s sudden free-fall is unclear, but similar to the Eli Lilly stock dip, the timing of the enthusiasm vacuum is highly suspicious.
It remains to be seen whether or not I end up paying the $8, wait for an alternative, or just abandon ship altogether. I don’t want to get caught up in what I believe to be a false verification wave, because I belive in the value of provenance. However, something like a small subscription fee for an ad-free version of the app makes comeplete sense to me. I am tempted to just ride it out a little longer and see what shakes out, but I am already getting my ducks in a row to shift to alternative social media platforms.
Thanks for reading! I still believe word of mouth is the best way to help, so if you enjoy what I’m doing, please tell somebody. If you have a comment, I’d love to hear it! Liking, subscribing, and sharing go a long way too. As usual, be well and stay safe.