If you haven’t already been made aware of the news – and I admire and respect all whose life choices mean they aren’t – Twitter owner and exploding vehicle connoisseur Elon Musk spent the weekend further ruining his $44 billion purchase by messing with what was left of the platform’s “verification system.”.
For much of Twitter’s existence, certain users could be “verified” by confirming their identity with the site. This was an essential tool for celebrities, athletes, corporations and the media, people who might or might not have been famous, but who were all
And for almost as long, certain weirdos have had one thing seeing a system designed solely to prove a user is who they say they are — a necessity on a social media platform — as a symptom of, I don’t know, some kind of left-wing media conspiracy .
This is a big reason why Musk finally got around to removing this old verification system last weekand replaced it with a “verified” system that required users to pay $8 to get a “verified” badge, even though absolutely nothing about their identity was “verified.”
In any case, it became particularly absurd when it turned out over the weekend that almost none of the formerly verified accounts would pay the 8 dollars. Not even millionaire celebrities. In fact, many even publicly poked fun at Musk and the decision. In return, Musk himself ordered that certain high-profile users still get a verified badge at Twitter’s expense, leading to incredible scenes like Lebron James, who declines the offer and video game dealer Wario64 — who has over 1 million followers, making him one of the site’s most popular users — who had a “blue tick” forcibly placed on his account and later removed.
Amidst all the chaos, a remarkable (and wild) array of reactions to events in the video game space came from Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games. I’m including his entire Twitter thread here in full, mainly so you can see how many times he’s so wrong must be officially corrected:
(Note: The hashtag #BlockTheBlue came from people who found out very quickly that the kind of person who would pay Musk $8 a month for Twitter is the kind of person you want to block immediately.)
This man complains about high school cliques and perceived “elites” is 52 years old and is worth nearly $5 billion.
