Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdavis703 | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure a blue check is very important for engagement. I don’t have a blue check, and easily drive more engagement than many verified accounts I follow. And I’m not the only one.

View on HN

Blue checks are an arbitrary decree from above that someone inside Twitter likes you. The whole thing is a sham.

It's even a badge of shame in some circles.

Which circles is it a badge of shame in?

This one

The folks who rage against the media and political establishment (blue checkmarks are basically granted automatically to journalists at traditional media outlets and to anyone running for office.)

Yes; among these political groups, "blue check" is a pejorative as belonging to the member of the "liberal elite" [0].

[0] https://theoutline.com/post/1323/verified-blue-checkmark-der...

Blue check used to mean "identity objectively verified", useful to confirm the twiterati using the name is the actual person/group others think they are.

Then came the Great Bluecheck Purge, where anyone exhibiting opinions not preferred by Twitter management had their blue check revoked/denied - which in practice was applied generally to Republicans, who constitute about half the USA. (We're talking mainstream views, not just weirdos.)

Ergo, anyone with a blue check is, by Twitter decree, not a Republican. For Republicans, blue check now amounts to a "badge of shame" indicating Twitter-approved opposition.

Blue checks were changed from "identity confirmed" to "one of us, not them".

this happens to leftists, journalists, and other critics, not just repubs:

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/twitter-political-account-ba...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions

No, you're confused. Those are suspensions. We're talking about removing the blue check mark or denying it. This happens to people who aren't morally-approved by Twitter for moral reasons.

For example, the blue check was removed from Milo Yiannopolous (the gay conservative provocateur who was canceled a few years ago), after he was previously verified.

Every "rule" on Twitter is no more than a tool used to create the appearance of left-wing consensus by suppressing alternative views through selective enforcement. Nothing is even-handed, and it's incredibly obvious when you're the target.

dirtbag leftists can't get blue checks and right wingers say "no one's being persecuted but us".

please move beyond this a bit and come to the understanding that every single thing Twitter does is arbitrary from rules enforcement, labeling, suspensions, etc. It's the nature of the service, and frankly boring at this point. We could talk more about why the business model sees this to continue (twitter can't disrupt its income stream and the rules that get enforced are those that allow Twitter to stay in business).

Interesting comparison: for the Left, you choose the qualifier “dirtbag” which presumably is a very small fraction of that faction ... while comparing that unpleasant small minority with the entire other half of the political spectrum.

I can (sort of, but would rather not) see denying authentication to problematic nutcases of any kind, and can see that edge case not pedantically covered/excluded by “nobody but us”. Sure, we can chalk up fringe cases to inconsistent boundaries of enforcement. But lumping in a plurality of users with edge cases is willful blindness to the blue check exclusion being official from-the-top policy, not mere erratic enforcement of vague rules by underpaid contractors.

Sure it’s boring if you’re not in the targeted plurality. It’s significant when Twitter is your only viable podium in the public town square, and anything you want to say that’s meaningfully & reasonably dissenting may get you kicked out because Twitter management is decidedly biased.

> while comparing that unpleasant small minority with the entire other half of the political spectrum.

These are verified:

https://twitter.com/McConnellPress

https://twitter.com/LeaderMcConnell

> Twitter is your only viable podium in the public town square

hah. Get a blog. this is a ridiculous assertion.

I’ve been blogging since before blogging was blogging. Personal blogs are now, on the whole, not viable.

Twitter is among the best platforms for being heard by the most people with the least cost/effort.

Yeah, I get your point - to wit “get your own press”, a line I’ve used long and often. Nonetheless I recognize the value of a place where a great many congregate to converse with many - and know the importance of that forum being neutral for the betterment of all, a truism Dorsey abandoned for the worse.

> only viable podium in the public town square

the vast majority of the Public (let’s say 90%) never looks at twitter, let alone whatever corner some drama is happening in

as far as getting media coverage (nightly news has even fewer eyeballs) you can do just as well sending out a press release

the greatest trick jack dorsey ever pulled was convincing certain people his platform is somehow indispensable

Sure, but it wasn't so absolute. They didn't uncheck all conservatives, they just applied standards unevenly (but probably, in their minds, justifiably), which results in disproportionate results.

It's an echo chamber problem, but I'm not sure it's deliberate.

In an organization with hundreds, possibly thousands of people, how would you get human-defined standards to be applied evenly when other people are actively existing in the grey area between what is and is not okay? Eg how do you define pornography that won't also get eg breast exams for cancer blocked? Now imagine that someone stands to make tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars if they can get something past your very human operators that both is (according to viewers) and is not (according to the censors) pornography.

The problem's even harder with text - sarcasm and satire just don't come off in pure text. Emoji and "/s" helps, but they're not requisite.

Wouldn't it be amusing if Twitter started doing verified red badges to signify Republicans? I guess if they really want to be all-inclusive, allow users to customize their badge colors too.

(I didn't know what a blue checkmark was until I turned off dark mode)

Amusing, but still problematic. Blue check was intended as neutral authentication. Turning it into a preferred faction indicator just serves to promote factional divisions - something Twitter could use a lot less of. …which brings us back to the OP point that blue checks have become a mark of shame, promoting division instead of objectivism.

If it's really about neutral authentication, tweet a keybase identity proof.

the only concept in that sentence understood by the median twitter user is “identity”.

the well-educated circles

Blue checks are mostly reserved for some specific categories of users: celebrities, mainstream media journalists, and politicians. It's not absolute but my experience is that being only reasonably well known (thousands of followers) in, say, tech circles isn't enough to get a blue check. So it's not so much being liked but being in a category which Twitter has determined is important to avoid people faking identity.

I had someone spoof my profile a while back. (Chose hard to tell apart user name and used my profile pic etc. to do some crypto spamming.) Twitter promptly nuked their account but wouldn't verify me afterwards.

While there are many factors, an essential one is that someone in Twitter finds you morally acceptable.

If Twitter thinks you're not morally good, they will actually remove a blue check which they previously granted (e.g. they did this to Milo Yiannopolous). If blue checks were just about identity veritifaction, this would make no sense since Milo's account's identity was never in question. Ergo, it isn't just about identity verification.

This has been my experience as well. A perfect example is podcasters - Anna [1] hosts a relatively popular and occasionally politically inconvenient podcast called Red Scare. No check. Alexandra [2], the host of Call Me Daddy, also a popular comedy podcast, naturally has a check. This is pretty openly discussed by e-celebs of middling fame. Until one reaches a critical mass of popularity, you won't get a check if you don't correctly toe the culture line.

[1] https://twitter.com/annakhachiyan [2] https://twitter.com/alexandracooper

The expectation to "toe the line" is twitter's problem.

Did Milo lose his verified status because someone didn't like him or was it because he broke some rule in the T&Cs? IIRC he was a big part of "gamergate", a movement that acted hostile to a subset of Twitter's user base.

That still implies it isn't about identity verification.

Sure, but it was never said to be purely an identify verification process. There have always been other requirements, some of which were not public. It's fair to assume that one requirement is to adhere to the T&Cs, although I can't confirm that.

> Sure, but it was never said to be purely an identify verification process. There have always been other requirements

Yeah. That's what people are annoyed about. That wasn't twitter's public position.

If it was about identity verification, the process should certainly not be reversible for "moral" reasons. Rather, I would expect some notability cutoff as the requirement for the blue letter. As it stands now, the manner in which it is distributed better reflects if Twitter (the org) likes you. That it generally also verifies your identity is secondary.

Sure, but this is barely different than air travel. You’ve got people on the no-fly list, unverified people in standard TSA, and if the US government likes you, you can get verified with TSA PreCheck. However the moment you do something dumb (say “accidentally” bring a gun) you get stripped of PreCheck.

Assuming that you "work on Twitter", ie, your career is in part built on Twitter, what do you think the value of a Blue Check is? I would bet it's worth more than $1000/yr to the average person in the "Twitter Middle Class" (someone using Twitter for work but not at mega scale). Even a single digit percentage point boost in engagement is worth a lot, or do you disagree?

Twitter is worth about the same as say a Bloomberg News or WSJ subscription to me. Perhaps slightly more. That is to say I’d pay a few hundred bucks for it.

But there’s no way I’m spending $1,000 a year on it if I can’t expense or write it off taxes (right now my usage is a mix of personal and non-personal, so it’s hard to correctly account for it).

A lot of journalists are financially poor, or at least don't make much income from their jobs. $1000/yr is a lot of money for journalists, especially at local newspapers.

Quite a few accounts I follow also don't have a Blue Check. If it started to cost money, I'm sure a lot of journalists would just choose not to be verified. The reason is that I'm not convinced that a Blue Check is tied to engagement with your Tweets, but rather the quality of your work outside Twitter.

An issue is that for some it's not worth as much as for Twitter. If my local police department uses Twitter to send out notifications on a current event the blue check confirms authority. Without the mark one can't distinguish original from fake/parody within the platform, which hurts the platform.

But there certainly is a demography who would pay well. Question is where to draw the line.

One or two people always ‘get’ my better tweets. That’s good enough for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com