He wants to charge for a checkmark. This both increases the cost of bots and is a form of authentication. It’s much easier to compare payment methods between accounts.
What makes you think users want any of this?
Frankly, most of the suggestions I've seen coming out of the SV "thought leaders" about what to do with Twitter are terrible. The bot problem isn't easily solved, and adding a ton of friction and/or reducing anonymity isn't going to be some huge boon to the platform.
He must think it will work?
Frankly, I think Reddit could do the same and give more weight to upvotes from those that prove they’re real.
It could help with disinformation problems and with finding signal.
<edit>I found the quote [0], which I had quoted in my essay "Why Twitter Should Verify More Users: Towards a More Human Web" [1]:
> Facebook’s killer feature was that it replicated the real world by forcing people to use their real names, whereas MySpace users used pseudonymous handles
[0]: https://www.yahoo.com/news/former-myspace-ceo-explains-why-1...
[1]: https://medium.com/hackmentalhealth/why-twitter-should-verif...
</edit>
I know one of the things I loved about Facebook was interacting with university-verified humans. Then it got flooded with more and more spam accounts.
I hope either these platforms or the next generation of platforms realize there is a strong opportunity for real-name policy platforms. It won't be the whole market, but I'm personally really tired of anonymous accounts. I mostly come to HN because there aren't many real-name platforms that talk about these things. Maybe that's because lots of people don't want it. I guess I just don't buy that argument. I think there's a niche for sure.
That is already a thing if you are verified and one of the reasons why "blue checkmark for $2" (Elon's plan) won't work and will make many verified people unhappy. They don't want even more peasants and "cloud chasers" in their verified timeline.
2. Most of the Twitter bots people are worried about when they talk about bots are state-funded.
If companies can't prevent a self-funded scalper, what makes you think Twitter will be able to prevent Russia? There are a lot of ways to obfuscate payments so they don't look to be coming from the same source. Even more ways when you control the banks.
But... scalpers do this, especially so. As far as a retailer is concerned, a scalper is every bit as 'real' as any other customer.
Now, if it succeeds, that does create an incentive for corruption within Twitter. The enemies of democracy have huge incentives to keep up these divisive public influence campaigns that have worked this past decade.
I work in this field and to be honest, the main reason retailers have issues curbing bots is that they don't really spend much resource on it. It's a game of cat and mouse, there's constant work that needs to be done but there's a lot of low hanging fruits that the vast majority of retailers don't do to block bots. And, no, just setting up perimeterx and calling it a day is not enough.
Then THAT gets sold to the Depts of Defense, Homeland Security, and whoever else wants.
I feel it’s fair to say we do.
Because if a checkmark costs $1/month for example, then spending a couple grand to be able to turn any story you want into "trending" is chump change for corporations, governments, and any particularly motivated silicon-valley salary'd employee.
There are already services which essentially sell you retweets - all this is is an adjustment to their business model to sell "verified retweets" and "aged verified retweets" (in case you want accounts with a posting history to do it).
It's a cost model adjustment, that might not even cost that much - after all if "verified" accounts receive less scrutiny from anti-bot algorithms, then they'd be cheaper to run then the developers/workers who need to keep your sockpuppet farm ahead of the game.
Non-government actors can get in on the action by procuring IDs in other ways ("Make money by scanning your late maw-maws ID"[1]), or large scale phishing campaigns (fake jobs or college admissions abroad with 100% applicant success rate, the only catch is scanned IDs and qualifications are required).
Electronic forgeries are likely the best way to do it at scale; just the other day, therr was a top story ok faking as if your document was scanned. Do the fine people handling verifications at Twitter know what a legit Madagascan ID looks like?
1. Or "Get $10,000 funeral assistance from this new Biden admin relief program"
> Do the people at Twitter know what a legit Madagascan ID looks like?
Yes, there are guides for checking ID cards, how do you think that they check ID cards in real life?
Oh no, I've broken the ID forgery laws of Burkina Faso and am in big trouble now. Isn't it a rule of low-level scamming to always target jurisdictions away from your own? State-actors don't care about commiting crimes against themselves, only the mid-level, "semi-pro" threat actors care about avoiding major crimes.
Get a face from a thispersondoesnotexist.com like generator. Get the format of the ID in a template, fill in random but realistic data. Like for example, 1000 names for each race-gender combo. Realistic zip codes and addresses from another source.
It’s about a weeks work to get it working to production quality, but it can be easily done.
For bonus credit, see if you can generate an image of the same person holding up this ID. Harder, but not impossible.
What’s frustrating is, those of us who work or have worked in Integrity have already discussed all of this for years. We know the easy solutions, the low hanging fruit. It’s not that helpful when a bunch of people say “why don’t you just charge $2 a month”
Is that assumption correct? It seems incredibly wrong to me, but I may be misinformed.
Those are also not really the problem.
For a lot of other people on Twitter, the pseudo-anonymity is a feature not a bug.
I’d pay if it allowed me to filter out garbage.
It’s like paying for the removal of commercials.
I don’t believe Musk intends to require people to be publicly identified.
I don’t believe I follow anyone anonymous on Twitter.
Authenticated real people are more valuable to advertisers.
If it’s only for verification they, yeah, they might be fine as long as the verification fee is optional.
A few bucks a month is nothing these days for dedicated netizens who want their social drug of choice.