Twitter's verified blue-tick badges may now become available to anybody who pays for it.
👉 Background: Twitter is the social media site famous known for giving a voice to anyone with a particularly strong opinion. Think: journalists, investors, celebs and everyday people who consider themselves thought-leaders.
👉 What happened: Back in April this year, Elon Musk offered $44 billion USD to acquire the whole of Twitter. Since he took ownership last week, he has:
👉 What else: And now, “verified” blue-tick badges may become available to anybody...who pays for it. And yes, this puts into question the whole idea of verified users.
💡Verification has always been a key part of Twitter’s value proposition. Although blue ticks are now considered an elite status symbol, they actually originated to prove authenticity of users.
💡Back in 2009, Twitter was struggling with major impersonation issues. And quickly after, the blue tick was brought in to establish authenticity of identities. As well as help Twitter uses discover high quality sources of information.
💡There are about 400,000 verified users on Twitter out of around 230 million Twitter users (less than 0.2% of all Twitter users). But if anybody and everybody can buy the blue tick, it may just become as worthless as dogecoin. And so may Twitter.
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