Twitter is a Newswire, Not a No-Go Theorem: Why People Don’t Verify Their Accounts on Twitter

If people don’t pay within 90 days for the monthly service, the blue check marks of existing users might be taken away.

“The whole verification process is being revamped right now,” Musk tweeted on Sunday. A day after that, Musk got in touch with a member of his inner circle, asking how much they would pay to be verified on the platform. A majority of responders chose the option not to pay.

Musk has moved quickly to shake up Twitter, including by firing its top execs. In tweets over the weekend, Musk polled his followers about whether to bring back Vine, Twitter’s defunct short-form video service, and said “absolutely” in response to a user’s suggestion to rethink the platform’s character limits. Musk is not sure how committed he is to pursuing any of these changes.

The blue check mark is a status symbol that is used to ensure that accounts are authentic and not fakes, particularly for influential accounts. If Musk were to create a paid barrier for verification, it could make it harder to distinguish whether a notable name is a bot or not.

Musk, who previously said he wants to “defeat the spam bots,” made the prevalence of spam and fake accounts on Twitter central to his effort to get out of the deal, before reversing course earlier this month and moving forward with the acquisition.

Every social network produces a unique posting style, and Twitter’s design incentivizes something slightly paradoxical: it’s one part newswire, one part nonsense. On one hand, Twitter is like a next-generation Bloomberg terminal where journalists post scoops and live coverage before it hits their websites and where politicians, businesses, and government agencies make official announcements about anything from customer service complaints to hurricane alerts. On the other, it’s the home of @horse_ebooks, Weird Twitter, a plethora of pseudonymous crypto evangelists and fandom stans, the Gorilla Channel tweet, and too many parody accounts to list. The first category benefits from Twitter’s default-public feed and rapid-fire text-snippet format — the second from how easily you can create accounts that aren’t tied to a real name or face and fire off bizarre jokes or hot takes.

At their worst, these two styles are not too different. The seriousness of Newswire twitter makes it funnier, and the style of Nonsense Twitpic adds to the humor. There’s even room for the occasional dose of chaos, like DPRK News: the fake North Korean propaganda feed that’s fooled several news outlets, including The Verge.

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All of which might sound like an argument for Musk’s new plan. It isn’t a lot to pay for preserving that sense of trust.