So Musk tweeted last night that Twitter Blue is getting revamped and verification is going to be part of the $8 a month bundle. Eight dollars. For a checkmark that, up until approximately six days ago, meant "we, Twitter, have confirmed this account belongs to who it says it belongs to." Now it means "this person's card didn't decline."
I want to be careful here because I know how this genre of post usually goes: somebody complains about a rich guy's website for 800 words and calls it a day. Not really my interest. What I actually keep chewing on is narrower: the checkmark was never a subscription feature, it was an identity feature, and you can't just relabel it and expect the meaning to survive the trip. A blue check next to a journalist's name or a public health agency's name was doing verification work. A blue check that anyone can buy for the price of two coffees is doing something else entirely, and nobody's told me yet what that something else is supposed to be. "Premium feed placement," apparently. Cool.
I run a tiny blog that nobody's verifying anything about, so this isn't personal outrage, more like professional curiosity about how fast a piece of social infrastructure can get gutted. Nov 2011 to now is eleven years of watching platforms promise stability and then not have it. Twitter's checkmark system wasn't even that old in the scheme of things (2009, I think), but people built real trust habits around it. Impersonation accounts of celebrities and companies used to get yanked fast specifically because the blue check made fakes obvious by contrast. Take the meaning out of the badge and you don't just lose a feature, you lose the contrast.
The Mastodon detour
Half my feed spent the weekend making jokes about moving to Mastodon, and because I am extremely easily peer-pressured, I actually made an account. Went with mastodon.social since I didn't know enough to pick a smarter instance, which in hindsight was probably the wrong move — that server is clearly getting hammered right now, my first two posts just sat there spinning before they went through. The whole federated-instance thing is neat in theory, genuinely, decentralization is the right instinct. In practice the onboarding is rough. Nobody explains what a "instance" even is before asking you to pick one, there's no algorithmic timeline (fine by me, but jarring if you're used to one), and the search function barely works, so finding the three people you actually follow on Twitter is mostly luck and hashtag guessing.
I don't think I'm leaving Twitter. I don't think most of the people posting "see you all on Mastodon!" are leaving either, honestly — it has the energy of people posting their new phone number and then never actually switching phones. But I kept the account open, and I might actually keep checking it, mostly out of stubbornness at this point.
Back to the eight dollars, though, because that's the part with actual stakes. If verification becomes pay-to-play, the incentive for scammers gets a lot more interesting. An $8 blue check next to a fake account impersonating, say, a bank's support line, or a pharma company announcing a fake product update, is a much cheaper con than it used to be. That's not a hypothetical I'm inventing to be dramatic, it's just how the incentives line up once the badge stops costing anything but money. I'd bet real cash we see a wave of exactly that kind of impersonation within a couple months of this actually shipping, if it ships the way it's being described.
Anyway. My Mastodon handle is out there now if you're one of the four people who'll actually go look for it, and I'll probably write again once the $8 thing either launches or gets walked back, which, given how the last week has gone, feels like a coin flip either way.