There is no other way to say it: Twitter is making a fool of himself over Elon Musk’s decisions, perhaps because of the transitive property. I have already said it on many occasions and I don’t mind repeating it one more time, it is totally understandable that the new owner of the social network has focused, from his first minute in charge of the company, on improving his income level. Of course, it’s still something that he should have thought about before committing to the bravado of committing to buy it, something that he later tried to back off, only to find out that he had so much to lose if he went ahead with the purchase. like it didn’t.
Be that as it may, from the beginning it has always acted with two clear objectives in relation to the social network: to ensure freedom of expression and to provide the best possible user experience to users… no, no, obviously it has not been like that , its two main objectives have been obtain profitability at all costs and become the absolute protagonist of the network. You know, the thing about the bride at the wedding, the baby at the christening, etc., something that I understand is nothing more than one of the usual symptoms of the megalomania that he has been showing off since his presence began to transcend. publicly.
One of the most controversial measures adopted so far has undoubtedly been kill the verified ones based on the relevance of the accounts, to replace it with a model in which the once coveted blue mark can only be obtained at the checkout. In other words, if you pay the monthly fee, you can pretend to be whoever you want, as was proven a few months ago. Yes, it is true that they have introduced some improvements, but I have serious doubts that now that many accounts have lost the old verified one, we are not going to experience a renaissance of fake accounts, only this time they are backed by the new and quite useless verified one .
Just a few days ago we told you that, given the loss of the verified by several celebrities who had already publicly expressed their intention not to checkout, it was Musk himself who decided to pay for their verified. But there is still more, and that is that according to what we can read in Business Insider, Twitter has added the verified badge to deceased celebrities, such as Michael Jackson, Kobe Bryant, Anthony Bourdain and Chadwick Boseman. By clicking on the badge displayed on their respective profile pages, we can read the following: «This account is verified because they are subscribed to Twitter Blue and verified their phone number.»
I’m going to save the jokes about the use of the oui-ha instead of phone numbers, to go directly to assess what happened. It is true, first of all, that part of these accounts are managed by heirs, foundations, etc., who could have decided to pay (although none have claimed to have done so, despite the request for information from said medium), but also It is true that others, like that of Anthony Bourdain, they have been completely inactive for a long timeso it’s strange to think that those currently running it, if anyone is, have decided to subscribe to Twitter Blue.
Recently, it was launched a protest movement that invites people to block all accounts with the verified, given its null utility under current conditions. Thus, we can understand these movements by Twitter-Musk as a response to try to reduce the loss of value of the verified, even if it is at the cost of giving it away. Of course, in reality, this is precisely how it has worked well since its inception, so I wonder if Musk will ever come to that same conclusion.
