Blue check marks

My first read this morning came from CTV News and was about the ongoing Twitter soap opera.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/layoffs-ultimatums-and-an-ongoing-saga-over-blue-check-marks-elon-musk-s-first-month-at-twitter-1.6170664

I can’t believe that the “blue checkmark” is such an issue.

First of all, it’s not a blue check mark. It’s actually a white checkmark on a blue badge or a black checkmark on a white badge if you use dark or dim display mode like I do.

I can remember when it came out and I was somewhat impressed with the purpose.

I figured that it was something that Twitter was doing on its end to promote certain types of accounts. For me, I guess I was kind of interested in authentic news organizations. I’m OK with CTV, CBC, GlobalTV, etc. But there are lots of others so I could see the purpose.

Then, it started to change. There were some people who felt they fell into this category and applied for the checkmark as a way to promote themselves. I have a few people on my timeline with the checkmark and it’s just a stream of self-promotion things. My first thought was to unfollow but I just mute these accounts and periodically go over and see if there is anything new. For some of them, it’s just more attention-grabbing content.

I like to think that I’m smart enough to know whether a message coming from an account is legitimate or whether it’s a spoofed account. A quick look at the profile or the history of messages is all that it takes. I’ve always figured that you should be who you are and it does come through in Social Media.

One of the things that I always enjoyed about Twitter was that it seemed to be a level playing field with each of us contributing what we felt we could. Not so – that silly little checkmark seems to have created a two-tiered playing field in some people’s eyes. Quite frankly, if you have to use Social Media to blow your own horn instead of trying to make things better, I have no time for you.

My recommendation to those/him that would aspire to make Twitter a better place is to go ahead and charge a substantial user fee for that checkmark. If a user is a legitimate news or political organization, they have ways to write it off as an expense. If it’s just a climber that wants to spam us and use it as a mark of credibility in their eyes, then they need to pay for that privilege.

Find your niche and work to make Twitter a better learning space instead.

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