Thread by @doctorow

A fun coda to this. When Twitter brought in pay-for-blue-or-we'll-hide-your-tweets-from-your-followers, they changed the pop-up text for "legacy" ticks to "Verified account. This is a legacy verified account. It may or may not be notable."

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1616821988722368513

However, the literal *instant* I paid $8, the tooltip changed to "Verified account. This account is verified because it's notable in government, news, entertainment or another designated category."

The amount of verification New Twitter undertook to transform the old tooltip to the new one is, of course, zero.

New Twitter trusts Old Twitter's judgments of "notability," but only when $8 changes hands.

The only thing they "verified" was that I had $8.

I guess that makes me "notable?" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's interesting to contrast this with the old "notability" verification.

In 2011, someone started impersonating me on Twitter. The only reason I found out (or cared) is a sizable number of people followed them and were deceived.

I tried complaining to Twitter using its content moderation form, but got silence. I emailed an old friend who worked at Twitter and he sent a backchannel message, and then someone at Twitter contacted me to say they could solve this by verifying me.

But the process back then was to (I am not making this up):

Fax.

Your.

Driver's.

License.

To.

Twitter.

Why fax? Because "email is insecure." What should you do if you don't have a fax machine? Use a random email-to-fax gateway that Twitter hadn't vetted in any way.

I made a stink, and my friend and I did a kind of fun verification exercise where he asked me three questions only I would know the answer to and he then vouched for me to Trust and Safety who gave me the blue tick, which led to them taking action against the impersonator.

It was a very weird and roundabout process - as far as I was concerned, the blue tick meant, "This account is 'notable' in that someone once impersonated it and tricked some Twitter users."

This actually isn't a bad criterion for "Which accounts should we take impersonation attempts seriously for?"

My understanding is that my friend was able to use our discussion to convince Trust and Safety to migrate away from faxed drivers' licenses to something better.

I'm not going to pretend that faxed driver's licenses were good, but they were bad because they were a fumbling, ad hoc attempt to protect Twitter users from impersonators while minimizing the amount of scanned IDs lingering in Twitter employees' inboxes.

Whereas the $8 to go from "may or may not be notable" to "notable in government, news, entertainment or another designated category" is deceptive as fuck.

Either New Twitter thinks Old Twitter's blue ticks are "notable" or it doesn't.

$8 shouldn't make a difference.

As sleazy as it is to block Twitter users from seeing the feeds they explicitlyce subscribed to unless the sender is paying $8 for a blue tick, this actually pales in comparison to this alchemy by which "maybe not notable" becomes "notable" by means of an $8 infusion.

If New Twitter thinks Old Twitter was "a crime scene," then either New Twitter believes the "criminality" extended to notability judgments or it doesn't.

The $8 notability toggle is a hell of a tell about New Twitter's true priorities: #enshittification, not cleaning house.