[fghsqwads]

The fact that I could find, prior to Musk, fairly famous people who were refused blue checks whereas I'd see 'literal who' journalists made it clear the verification system was politically biased. People mad at Twitter 'Blue' are primarily mad that this bias went away.

Not that this goes too far against what the article is stating, but the headline at least: many of us thought that the blue check was de facto already devalued when you'd find blue checks you'd never heard of who write for Kotaku or some other bullshit outlet.

[meetingthrower]

That was because Twitter gave them out en mass as a marketing ploy (growth hacking.) They literally gave them out to every newsroom for every writer, using the media outlets themselves as marketing engines to get their writers to post content. And the journalists and politicos all being on there made Twitter relevant. So it was a nice network effect.

Now we understand that the whole thing is social media hell. Just looking in the feed occasionally makes you so depressed about humanity. (But it is all performative as it really affects my life zero.)

[cglong]

There was a funny video a few years back about this exact ploy https://youtu.be/ni8CpIJpmqw