Blue Check Verification, RIP
As Twitter continues its meltdown, the big reveal may be that social media was never forever
Happy Saturday, political junkies! Sorry to be late, but I got jammed up working on the podcast with socialist feminist Nancy Fraser that is dropping Monday. If you know someone else who would be interested, please:
Last Thursday, the blue checks vanished.
Not the people (people with a Twitter verification badge were often, as a category of users, called "blue checks"), but the badges themselves now only signify that one has subscribed. A range of users, from prestige media like The New York Times to sh*t media like Breitbart, refused to pay and instituted a non-reimbursement policy for its writers. Twitterstorians like Princeton historian Kevin Kruse and Harvard's Annette Gordon-Reed became civilians again.
A former legacy blue check, I capitulated back in January. I subscribed to the new Twitter Blue because this newsletter was getting buried deliberately. It was a sad moment to purchase the right to be read. Under the old Twitter regime, you had to submit multiple articles written for public outlets and a lot of identification to get a journalism blue check. So when Twitter wrote to tell me I had been approved, I felt as though I had made it.
Populist Twitter, both left and right, hated the blue check: why shouldn't everyone, from the meanest bot to the most distinguished pundit, be the same? I hope they—or someone—are happy: it now signifies nothing. Although impersonating others is against Twitter rules, anyone could now call themselves some version of "Claire Potter," buy a blue check, and tweet as if they were me. It's the easiest hack there is. In fact, New York City's Twitter account was immediately duped (h/t Kara Swisher.)
Now, all that blue check means that I have, or rather had, $90. More accurately, my research account had $90, a legitimate expense since part of my job out here on the interwebz is to make my employer look good.
"Academic class privilege there, but ok," commented one of my followers when I revealed this financial dodge in a tweet.
You betcha. Although honestly? Given that most professors are paid less than any other worker who requires 14 years of training for full certification, "Academic class privilege" is an oxymoron.
In general, left-of-center journalists have not paid, and sites to the right of The Bulwark have. One interesting exception is Ann Coulter, and I suspect this is because she is far too cool for school, and having no check may be the "new black." Right-wing writer and podcaster Ben Shapiro paid for a blue check, but his outlet, The Daily Wire, has a gold check, which signifies that it is a verified business: so do Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal and New York Post. Perhaps because it wants to seem like a legitimate news outlet, Breitbart News has no check at all, but its writers are all rocking a blue check.
As a freelance writer, purchasing the blue check now screams: "I am a freelancer who can't afford not to be boosted by Elon Musk!" I suspect this is one reason that well-employed writers have eschewed something they could easily afford if they wanted to: like a recalled Tesla, the blue check has gone from prestigious to tacky overnight. For example, although the New York Times is checkless, Susanne Craig, a New York Times reporter, still has a check—and is so embarrassed about it that she has a statement in her profile saying that she didn't pay for it. Elon Musk gave writer Stephen King, athlete LeBron James, and actor William the Shatner—all of whom had publicly said they would not pay—a free blue check anyway. King and James have publicly repudiated their blue checks. Uncool.
So what happens next? Months ago, when Musk announced the new subscription program and then commenced to literally break the platform, my networks got busy establishing handles elsewhere. Mastodon, Post, and Spout were common destinations: I have profiles and dutifully post these columns there, but as far as I can tell, I get very little traffic from any of these sites. Worse, I can't seem to start or join a conversation on any of these platforms. I have a general sense that this is true for nearly everyone who has established a presence elsewhere, except for a few people with large followings everywhere—and even their likes follows, and comments are dramatically diminished.
Many of us are pinning our hopes on the recently launched Substack Notes, which is clean and easy to use and built on a pre-existing network of short-form readers and writers (like you!) As an interesting aside, because people who write and subscribe to Substack are genuine readers (whereas Twitter is packed with cranks who, regardless of their politics, seem not to read at all), Notes has also gotten me a lot of new subscribers.
Twitter never drove subscriptions for me. So, how might Twitter's conscious uncoupling with the mainstream media affect news distribution? That will take some time to play out, but here are some guesses.
Social media accelerated mass interest in the news but at the cost of disassociating journalists and the stories they wrote from the outlets where they were edited and published. Might those who wish to be well-informed consider subscribing to publications again—and reading them? It's not just conservatives who classify everything they dislike as "liberal media" despite radically different house styles, editorial policies, and political stances. Because Twitter users receive stories á la carte and often read only the headline or maybe the first few paragraphs, people who get most of their news from social media feeds will likely see no fundamental difference between the New York Times, The New Republic, and New York magazine. Because we will probably see less news in our feeds, remaining well-informed under the new Twitter regime will require choosing a few publications and subscribing to them—which might cause people to read and think more deeply.
Twitter's woes may accelerate the shift to Web 3.0, in which all content goes directly to the consumers who have chosen the content they wish to receive. The idea that, simply by virtue of being on the internet, any of us were exposed to a diverse, democratic conversation died about fifteen years ago. That said, habits will not easily be broken: mainstream news outlets will have to up their newsletter and direct messaging game to keep wooing subscribers back to the main site.
The media might stop pandering to the lowest common denominator to get attention. We know that first Facebook and then Twitter changed journalism as news outlets altered their content to compete for shortened user attention spans. Headlines, graphics, and ledes had to be clickable and stand out in a chaotic feed where they were forced to compete with clickbait items pretending to be news. Whereas the job of a news article from a legit site is to inform or persuade, the only job of clickbait news is to pull the reader back to the main site, where they will be barraged by ads. For example, when I clicked on a tweet from Ben Shapiro's Daily Caller that had a link to "Annoying Drunk Women Are Triggering Surge In Stadium Brawls. Send In The Troops," I was immediately hit with ads for Xfinity, Hammacher Schlemmer, Jimmy Choo, and Daytona Beach.
.Although, like many people, I am sorry to see the old Twitter go, it is fascinating to watch it melt down in real-time, and it isn't just Twitter. Meta, Facebook's parent company, has let go of 21,000 workers since November and is planning two additional rounds of layoffs in April and May. Although we all use these programs reflexively, they aren't new or fun anymore.
I think social media as we knew it is over—and the future? It may look like an unexpected shoring up of legacy media, with outlets like Substack carving out a future for independent producers. Or it may look like something else—but Elon or no Elon, Twitter was never forever. That's the one thing you can always be sure of on the internet.
Where Political Junkie is getting namechecked:
Political reporter Joan Walsh’s recent essay in The Nation about the Dominion settlement, “Thanks to Dominion’s Lawsuit, We Got the Truth About Fox. The Rest Is Up to Us.” (April 20, 2023)
What I’m watching (other than Succession):
HBO Max’s Perry Mason is a fabulous update of both the original Earl Stanley Gardner series and the CBS TV series starring Raymond Burr that ran from 1957-1966 that was then reprised on NBC from 1985-1995. Paul Drake (Chris Chalk) is Black, Della Street (Juliet Rylance) is a lesbian who is going to law school, District Attorney Hamilton Burger (Justin Kirk) is gay, and Perry (Matthew Rhys) is a shell-shocked war hero with a messy personal life who can’t stop trying to get justice in hopeless, politicized murder cases.
Short takes:
The power-drunk Republican Texas State Senate just passed three bills designed to promote religion in public schools—to students and employees. The legislation includes the mandate to display a poster of the Ten Commandments in each classroom that is at least 16”x “20, requires time for prayer, and protects religious speech by faculty and administrators. “John Litzler, general counsel and director of public policy at the Texas Baptists Christian Life Commission has opposed the bill, arguing that taxpayer dollars should not be put toward religious texts and that parents, not schools, should be the ones talking to their children about religion,” the Washington Post’s Timothy Bellah writes. (April 21, 2023)
Weeping crocodile tears over here for another important fallout of the $787.5 million settlement between Fox Corp and Dominion Voting Systems: Fox shareholders are pissed because some of that money was their profits, and the bleeding doesn't stop until the lawsuits stop, baby. “One such shareholder complaint is already on file in Delaware Chancery Court,” Reuters business reporter Alison Frankel writes. “And based on my conversations on Tuesday night with four prominent shareholder lawyers, all of whom asked to remain anonymous as they solidify their legal strategies, additional lawsuits against Fox officers and directors are on the way.” (April 19, 2023)
The mysterious Harlan Crow has popped up again—not at a Nazi memorabilia show or on a yacht peeling grapes for Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas—but with the supposedly moderate “No Labels” political group. According to The New Republic’s Daniel Strauss, Crow not only gave the group $130,000 but bundled a dozen other donors. The response of “No Labels” to Strauss’s inquiries also seemed—tetchy. “In response to questions about whether No Labels felt any sort of pause about Crow given his close ties and gifting to Thomas,” Strauss writes, “spokesperson Maryanne Martini argued that Crow and his relationship with Thomas was `just noise.’ Martini accused The New Republic of writing this story because it was peddled by special interest groups.” (April 19, 2023)
Just Steven King's luck to get branded with a blue check after complaining about how expensive idiotic blue checks are.
Musk knows his product is crap and knows he needs a couple of actual famous and interesting people sporting the check more than they need it.
Well said. 90% of what I wanted from Twitter is now gone. Still on the site but only because of a few personal folks I actually know and do equine advocacy work. Don’t miss it at all. Loving the Substack Notes!