Elon turning a $8 subscription into a culture war artifact doesn’t invalidate the idea of a subscribing for legitimacy altogether.
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.