Elon Musk.
Adrees Latif/Reuters
Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, plans to charge people $8 to be verified on Twitter.
He framed it as solving a class divide, saying the “current lords & peasants system” is “bullshit.”
But putting a pricetag on the blue checkmark completely misses the point.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and new owner of Twitter, is asking the social network’s users to pay him for a safety-focused feature that already exists — and is currently free.
When Musk announced on Tuesday that people would have to pay $8 per month in order to be verified, something that currently costs zero dollars and helps thwart misinformation, he framed it as solving a class divide on Twitter.
If you don’t think about the logic of it too hard, Musk makes it sound great.
“Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit,” Musk tweeted.
But held up to closer inspection, that argument implodes upon itself.
Musk doesn’t appear to realize the irony of his tweet, nor does he seem to understand the point of verification.
It’s not just about having a blue checkmark next to your name. By making people pay a monthly fee for it, Musk is opening the doors for a rise in impersonations of government officials, journalists, and other public figures — and a surge in misinformation as a result.
Sure, Musk said that there would be a “secondary tag” below a public figure’s name, like there is currently for elected officials. But even so, turning a safety feature into a “revenue stream,” as Musk referred to it, in the name of populism is an ugly look for the world’s richest person. (Musk’s net worth as of the end of the day Tuesday was $204 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. For comparison, relatively poor Mark Zuckerberg is worth $36.8 billion.)
There are also reports that Musk plans to yank verification away from those who already applied for and received it — essentially holding their blue checks hostage unless they further pad his wallet. That element of Musk’s plan alone, if implemented, threatens a clear step backward when it comes to efforts to make Twitter a more trustworthy platform.
In hindsight, it’s somewhat expected: Musk has frequently criticized strict social-media moderation. So giving little thought to the way trolls could take advantage of his new system would be on-brand.
He wrote in a letter to advertisers last week that he doesn’t want Twitter to be a “free-for-all hellscape,” but his monthly charge won’t mitigate that from happening.
Publicly, Musk is framing this change as leveling the playing field, and he’s painting a blue checkmark as a status symbol that was doled out unevenly in the past. Twitter’s system for determining who received verification and who doesn’t has been opaque. But, as many have pointed out, offering it for free is what would actually level the playing field.
Instead, Musk is trying to make that change easier to stomach by rolling it into Twitter’s current membership model, Twitter Blue, which gives members access to certain features. The new Twitter Blue would give members priority in replies and search; grant them the ability to post long-form video and audio; include “half as many ads”; and bypass news publishers’ paywalls for outlets that participate, Musk has said in recent tweets.
But, like making verification only a paid-only feature, juicing the visibility of paying members’ tweets flies directly against Musk’s claims of “leveling the playing field.”
As Microsoft Research economist David Rothschild put it, Musk is essentially saying: “The more money you spend, the more elevated your speech.” That’s the exact opposite of what the verification system should be striving for.
There’s nothing wrong with Musk wanting to make Twitter a more viable business, of course — the issue is his current approach. Charging people for a feature that’s always been free has the potential to alienate even Twitter’s most active users, both those who can afford it and especially those who can’t.
And there will absolutely be those who can’t — a whole new class of people cut off from an identify-verifying safety feature simply because they’re not able, or willing, to help make the richest man in the world even richer.