A blue tick massacre

Oliver Lamb, Deputy Editor, reviews the troubled launch of the Twitter Blue scheme

TWITTER'S famous blue ticks no longer mean what they used to. In fact, the old blue ticks no longer exist. By the 20th April, all so-called legacy verified users — numbering over 400,000 — had been stripped of their status. They had already been surpassed by the still rapidly growing population of Twitter Blue subscribers, now estimated to be over 600,000-strong.

Blue ticks, launched in 2009, were intended to address the problem of impersonation on Twitter by lending legitimacy to the verified accounts of well-known figures and organisations. But when Elon Musk bought the company in October, the blue tick — like over 80 per cent of Twitter’s staff — found itself surplus to requirements. Within two weeks of his making landfall, Musk had unveiled Twitter Blue, which allows any Twitter user to pay $8 per month for a blue tick next to their name. Naturally enough given that impersonation was the problem blue ticks were designed to solve in the first place, there were concerns that Twitter users could pass themselves off as well-known figures. Indeed, Twitter Blue was sus pended days after it launched when the pharmaceutical firm Eli Lilly and Company appeared to tweet, “We are excited to announce insulin is free now”. Eli Lilly’s stock plunged and their real account apologised for the confusion. Former US presidents Donald Trump and George W. Bush and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani were among other figures impersonated. Why, then, did Musk launch Twitter Blue? One can only guess at the interior monologue of a man who gave his Tesla cars a Ludicrous mode, then followed that up with a space rocket that he chris tened the 'Big Fucking Rock et'. Presumably, though, extra revenue had something to do with it. In announcing mass redundancies last November, Musk claimed that Twitter was losing $4 mil lion a day. Adver tising brings in the vast majority of the company’s income, and that income is dwindling amid general economic troubles. A memo leaked in March revealed that Twitter is worth $20 billion, less than half the $44 billion Musk paid.

When it became clear that uptake of Twitter Blue was not as high as hoped, Musk announced a new feature: subscribers would enjoy the exclusive privilege of appearing in the For You feed, as well as of being able to vote in polls. This, he said, was to address the problem of AI-run bot swarms. Verified ac -