Impersonation-at-scale depends on scale, not verification of individual accounts as authentic people with authentic notability and opinions, and impersonation not at scale sometimes feels more motivated to pay the $8 than the person or position being impersonated.
Also, I'd note the gp didn't bad-mouth Elon or Verisign so your comment is a kind of riding a trolly false accusation.
The CA system, on the other hand, has more or less abandoned the expensive, manual "extended verification" process in favor of the zero marginal cost "domain verification" process. This switchover drove the cost of a new cert to $0 for almost all users.
So I'm really not following your analogy, since Twitter gave up the workflow and started charging (aka, a cash grab), whereas CAs gave up charging and adopted a more efficient workflow (aka the expected behavior of efficient markets).
“Paid account with extra features” is just far easier to parse than “someone at Twitter thinks this person/company is both authentic and important.”
The Meta implementation therefore seems smarter (depends on gov ID).
People were doing verified accounts for my ISP support twitter that day, lol
I don't need that information to pass via Bob Woodward for a hard-hitting journalistic enquiry into the truth of the claim.
someone created an account named USEmbassy_SaoTome and that had twitter verification = that was indeed the official account of the US Embassy there.
consider after Twitter Blue
someone creates an account named USEmbassy_Kiribati and has the twitter blue mark. You dont really know this is an official account. anyone can pay for this
PS: this is just hypothetical I dont really know if those embassies exists.
They muddied that water, I just don't bother with the site much anymore. I never gave a shit about the gen pop on there and it's just amplified a bunch of strangers and nobodies - I'm sure their friends and families love them, but I didn't come on the internet to see them and since twitter blue all kinds of stupid shit from nobodies with blue checks magically makes it into my feed. It's just a garbage website now.
If everyone on twitter were paying for verification, I think twitter would be much more interested in defending the sanctity of said system.
As it stands, they are currently just trying to get the feature out there and get people to pay. Getting it deployed trumps making it perfect.
I don't see them making the now that we've got a bunch of people paying for it, lets reduce our revenue by suddenly becoming strict on it again decision. Or people taking the badge more seriously now it just means someone subscribed to Twitter Blue
That's not what it meant. It was an award for being notable. $8 is a fee that you pay to get verified.
Using an arbitrary and biased determinant of who is notable.
https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2021/06/28/twitter-verifica...
Very useful.
> “this is a person who speaks with authority of some sort, listen to them”
Rather, "this is a person that people at Twitter have blessed with authority. It's astounding that you care what we think."
> “someone pays eightbux”
To have their identity verified. This is where I pretend to be shocked that a certain class of people prefer arbitrary credential grants by unelected authorities, and that they look at a simple identity verification service that accepts anyone who is willing to show their papers and pay with absolute contempt.
$8 cheapens their pageant award.
No, they think arbitrary credential grants by unelected authorities that attempted to verify people were who they said they were represented a more useful verification service than one which initially made anyone who was willing to pay $8 a "verified" account in the name of a famous person and still doesn't actually check identity.
This is where I pretend to be shocked that a certain class of people will insist a clusterfuck of such epic proportions they had to suspend it for a month after launch was actually a genius move.
did you care about the so-called "pageant award"?
It'd probably work a bit on LinkedIn because of the nature of the user base and lots of people already expensing Premium accounts, but funnily enough I'm not sure LinkedIn actually has that much of a fake account problem...
Oh it does for sure, unfortunately many people are more than happy to connect with anyone who wants to connect with them because “LinkedIn doesn’t have a fake account problem”. And many people post resumes, entire employment history, all professional social connections, etc. and so all you need to do is pretend to be a student of your targets alma mater and now you have all of that personal info with the click of a Connect button. I’ve noticed trends where someone would try to connect with me and they’d be connected with some acquaintances of mine, but not once have I ever heard of that person. Those types of accounts exist, are fake, and steal information.
If you haven’t 1-1 met someone before in person or via actual business relationship you should definitely not connect with them on LinkedIn.
"Culture war artifact" is not a real term. I've never had what looks like a reasonable combination of three words come up with zero hits in a search engine.
What happened is that Musk decided to charge for identity verification instead of granting it to favored media people, and other people already involved in a culture war where Musk plays the villain added that to their long list of incomprehensible grievances.
Is this really your barometer for discussion, that all grammatical phrases must first exist in Google search results for them to be considered valid self-expression? If so that's pretty out there.
There's a wonderful irony here in that this a discussion about a Megacorp validating people's identity and here you are telling someone that their words are not valid because they haven't been validated by some other Megacorp.
The phrase "culture war" itself wasn't in use in English before it was used in the title of a book in the early 90s [1]. There were no search engines then.