So I did the dumb thing. Wednesday night, right after Twitter Blue started rolling out its new $7.99-a-month "verification," I signed up. Not because I needed a blue check (I run a blog about, checks notes, myself, mostly), but because I wanted to see what happens when you let anyone buy the thing that used to mean "this account is who it says it is." Turns out what happens is chaos, and it happened fast.
By Thursday morning my feed was a mess of fake-verified accounts doing bits. A blue-check "Nintendo" posted Mario flipping people off. A blue-check "LeBron James" announced he was requesting a trade. Someone made a blue-check "George W. Bush" that I won't quote here because it was genuinely upsetting, not funny-upsetting, just upsetting. And then the one that actually moved markets: a fake "Eli Lilly" account, blue check and all, tweeted that insulin was now free. Eli Lilly's actual stock dropped on it. A joke account knocked billions off a pharma company's market cap for an afternoon because the checkmark used to mean something and now it apparently means eight bucks.
I want to be clear that I think this is funny. I laughed at the Nintendo one out loud, alone, in my kitchen, which is not a great look but there it is. The problem isn't that people are using a new feature to be dumb on the internet, people have always used every new feature to be dumb on the internet, that's basically the whole internet. The problem is that "verified" was doing actual load-bearing work for a lot of people who aren't chronically online enough to know that the blue check just changed meaning overnight. Somebody's uncle sees a blue check next to "Eli Lilly" and has no reason not to believe it. That's not a joke landing wrong, that's a trust signal getting hollowed out with zero warning to the people who relied on it.
And this morning it looks like Twitter agrees, at least a little: new sign-ups for the $8 check appear to be paused as of today, less than 48 hours after the thing launched. No official explanation posted anywhere I can find yet, just a quiet stop. Which tells you a lot on its own. You don't pause a brand-new subscription product two days in because it's going great.
Here's my actual opinion, since I'm supposed to have one and not just narrate the news at you: charging for verification was never really the bad idea. Plenty of platforms charge for badges, features, priority support, whatever, and nobody riots. The bad idea was collapsing "I paid for a subscription" and "I am who I claim to be" into the same little blue icon that had spent years training people to read it as the second thing. You can sell a badge. You can sell identity confirmation. Selling a badge that LOOKS like identity confirmation, on day one, with no rollout period and no separate visual treatment, is just asking for exactly what happened. It wasn't hard to see coming, honestly — I saw people calling this exact scenario in replies before the feature even fully rolled out to everyone.
Small aside because I can't help myself: I also think eight dollars is a weirdly specific price. Not $5, not $10, but $7.99 (well, $8 even, on iOS with Apple's cut baked in it's apparently closer to $11, which is its own whole thing people are annoyed about). Feels like a number that tested well in a spreadsheet somewhere rather than one that means anything to an actual person deciding whether to pay it.
My own checkmark, for what it's worth, is still sitting there next to my name like nothing happened, mostly because I forgot to cancel and I'm curious how long it survives whatever Twitter does next. I did not, to be clear, impersonate anybody. I don't have the creativity for it and also my mother follows this blog.
Anyway. If you're reading this from far enough in the future that "Twitter" means something else entirely, or the checkmarks are gone, or the whole site is gone — hi, hope things are fine. If you're reading this the same week I wrote it, go look at your feed right now, I promise there's a fake CEO tweet in there somewhere doing more damage than the real one ever would.