Elon Musk has made a host of controversial changes to Twitter since he bought the company for $44 billion last October. But few have been as chaotic as his decision to charge users $8 a month to become verified and obtain the coveted “Blue tick” badge next to their Twitter handle.
The paid verification scheme caused chaos globally as a flood of fake profiles proudly displaying their blue ticks emerged from nowhere. The debacle looks all the worse for Twitter, considering the progress being made in social reputation systems by startups elsewhere, such as Phaver.
Twitter states that the blue tick allows users to check that an account is authentic. Yet it often means much more than that. For the general public, the blue tick signifies social importance, and has become a highly coveted badge users aspire too, in part because Twitter’s original verification process made it very difficult to obtain.
Part of Musk’s motivation to change things stems from the fact that Twitter’s blue tick has a reputation for getting things wrong. Back in 2017, after Twitter received widespread condemnation following a decision to verify white supremacists, the company halted the blue tick scheme for almost three years. The verification process was revamped and reintroduced in 2021, only to fail again as numerous blue ticks were handed out to fake accounts and bots.
Musk’s new policy was intended to prevent that from happening, ostensibly by giving power back to the users:
Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit.
Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2022
However, the new system has only made things worse. Now, Twitter appears to have abandoned its old vetting system, and while its filters were somewhat inadequate, they were better than nothing. With the rollout of the $8 fee, Twitter has spawned thousands of new fake accounts, while removing the blue ticks from previously trusted accounts that refused to pay up.
Celebrities, public figures and government organizations are just some of the Twitter users who lost their verified status, paving the way for numerous copycat accounts who are prepared to pay a small fee. Fake accounts purporting to be the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, Donald Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani and the Pakistan Cricket Board Chairman Zaka Ashraf are just some of the notable examples of this happening. Meanwhile, the BBC reports that verified accounts are causing chaos with false and misleading posts about the war in Ukraine.
Verification Is Meaningless
Twitter’s new blue tick system is clearly not working as Musk intended and is actually having the opposite effect of creating more inauthenticity on the platform, leading to growing misinformation, fake news and scams.
The failure of the $8 fee was entirely predictable because the very idea of “payment verification” actually has nothing to do with verifying anyone.
Although Twitter’s older process was flawed and could be manipulated by malicious users, the scheme nonetheless did have some success in eliminating illegitimate accounts and activity on the platform. It was better than nothing, and the Blue Tick became a status symbol that was largely trusted by most users, who took it as a sign that an account was genuine. With the new fee, all Twitter’s blue tick does now is verify that the person controlling an account has $8 in spare change.
What payment verification doesn’t do is prevent the platform from being exploited by users who intend to cause harm and confusion. For instance, we have already seen conspiracy theorists such as QAnon John become legitimized by acquiring a blue tick.
Twitter’s system is totally flawed because the blue ticks have nothing to do with a user’s reputation. For verification to work, it has to be based on the user’s behavior. Or in other words, awarded to users with strong reputations backed by a history of positive activity.
Reputation Is What Matters Most
Considering Musk’s penchant for cryptocurrencies, it’s hard to understand why he didn’t consider building a more foolproof system based on the decentralized technology he clearly understands. Web3 platforms have gained a reputation for using people’s reputations based on their previous activity as a kind of social currency for verification.
“Don’t trust, verify” is one of the most famous mantras of Bitcoin enthusiasts, and refers to the belief that people should put their trust in decentralized, cryptographic systems to safeguard their wealth rather than centralized bankers.
Web3 is built using many of the same technologies that enable trust in crypto, including blockchain, distributed storage, digital wallets and tokenization. These technologies have come together to create an entirely new approach to digital identity that’s growing popular with Web3 users – the idea of a self-sovereign identity that’s managed entirely by the user. SSIs rely on a distributed architecture based on blockchain and independent validators who are incentivized to tell the truth. With these systems, users can own and control their digital identities, and they’re rigorously authenticated and extremely secure.
Such a system could easily be integrated into Twitter or any other social media platform. Phaver is a decentralized social app that has already done this with its unique reputation system, Phaver Cred, which provides users with a gamified way to slowly build up their reputation. Each user’s Cred score factors in their daily activity on the platform, the age of their account, their wallet assets, such as the NFTs they own, and various other metrics to offer protection against fake accounts and bots. It takes a lot of time and effort to build up a trusted Cred score, preventing spammers from easily creating multiple accounts and paying a small fee to gain access to wide audiences. Any user with a solid Cred score can immediately be considered as authentic.
The experience of Twitter’s blue tick shows us that paid verification is the wrong way to go. After all, being verified is not at all the same as having a good reputation, and that’s as true in the real world as it is on social media.
Consider this: Absolutely anyone can show a policeman’s identity badge and claim to be a law enforcement officer, but that doesn’t mean they really are. There are many ways to fraudulently obtain an ID. On the other hand, a small town community, where everyone knows everyone else, will immediately recognize its local chief constable or sheriff, based on that individual’s reputation and nothing else. None of the locals will ask to see the sheriff’s ID.
Musk would do well to realize this enormous difference between verification and reputation. Verification on Twitter costs just $8, while a trusted reputation is worth its weight in gold.
