Elon’s Twitter: Classist Blue Check System… Reinvented As Even More Elitist Gray Checks, Goes Live, Then Elon Says He’s Killed It

Overhype

from the the-king-is-dead,-long-live-the-king dept

I keep pointing out that Twitter was already doing most of what Elon seems to want to do, but he (and his fans) has not quite realized that. Also, while Twitter was often slow in rolling stuff out, and not the best at explaining what it was doing, many of its features were created pretty thoughtfully and carefully, taking a variety of trade-offs and issues into account. I’ve also tried to get across some of the basic realities of content moderation that Elon seems to have had difficulty grasping, including how he totally misunderstood the purpose and intent of Twitter’s verification process.

While Elon and some others believe it’s a “status” symbol (i.e., something of value worth paying for), the reality is that it was designed and initially used specifically for a safety purpose: to help make it clear that notable users were, in fact, who they said they were. Now, this obviously opens up plenty of (quite reasonable!) concerns about who decides who is and who is not notable. It’s the Wikipedia “not notable” problem all over again.

But, with Elon giving the rapidly diminishing Twitter staff just one week to design a new “verification” program so that only people willing to pay $8 per month get to have a blue checkmark, he was completely upending the system. Especially since the new one… does not have a verification component. Lots of people called out this problem and worried about the potential for abuse. Twitter earlier this week announced it was delaying rolling out the new blue check system until after Tuesday’s election. I doubt this actually had anything to do with the election, and was much more about the system not being ready.

Of course, as we discussed yesterday, even though the new stuff hasn’t been rolled out, the “new” Twitter rolled out what they claimed was the updated app over the weekend, leading Musk stans to pay up and then get annoyed that their coveted blue check wasn’t actually working.

Still, people keep pointing out that this system is going to be widely abused, as it does away with the entire point of the blue check verification system. So, no worries, Twitter has come up with a solution: meet… the gray check.

Esther Crawford, a product management director at Twitter who went a bit viral for sleeping on the floor of the office explained this in a tweet:

So, basically:

But, more to the point, they’re literally just reinventing everything they claimed was bad and wrong. And, yes, they’re making it clear that the new gray check won’t be given out as widely as the blue check, but remember that the blue check was pretty limited in the first place and that was part of the reason why people got so mad about it. Including Elon. Remember the whole talk about how the old system was “lords and peasants” and power to the people?

So, he’s now replaced that system with one that is even more exclusive and, unlike the blue check system that had clear rules and policies (not always good rules, and not always well enforced, but still), the new system… seems to have no details and no official policies as of yet.

And this morning things got even dumber. The “official” gray checkmark started rolling out, but basically everyone started mocking it. Nobody with any design skills seems to have been involved in mocking it up, and it just looked stupidly confusing. It also seemed entirely random who had the official check and who didn’t (lords and peasants, lords and peasants). I mean, SpongeBob got it:

And then… SpongeBob lost it:

Why? It appears that Sir Lord Tweets-a-lot decided to kill it hours after it rolled out:

Meanwhile, Crawford notes that it’s not fully going away, it’s just being limited to some people. Lords and peasants. Lords and peasants.

Once again, a smart leader might have spent let’s say… 90 days going around, talking to people, understanding why things were done the way they were done, and the different trade-offs and challenges and then make a more informed decision. Instead, Musk fired the leadership after about 90 seconds, then immediately (over a weekend) demanded a complete reworking of the system in a week, in the middle of which he fired half of the staff.

That’s… not leadership. That’s a case study in how not to do anything.

Also, I can’t see how any of this is assuring advertisers that the platform is safe to advertise on. Or convincing legitimate people that it’s worth tossing $8 a month to a man who might decide tomorrow not to give anyone a blue check or to jack up the price to $69 a month.

Of course, the $8 blue check that Musk insists is “the great leveler” is already the great leveler… for scammers. There’s already someone who bought their $8 bluecheck, changed their name to Twitter and seemed to have successfully fooled people… with a crypto scam. You know, the thing Musk swore the new blue check system would eliminate.

Yup. Things are going just great…

Filed Under: blue checks, elon, gray checks, verification
Companies: twitter