How Elon Musk broke the blue check and reality

A little bit of news:

Yes, Bluesky—the platform winning the social media wars (as much as one can these days)—may be adding “blue checks” to the platform along with the ability to connect your account to your domain to prove your account’s authenticity.

This will likely stoke some cries of reviving the “lords & peasants system” that Elon Musk accused Twitter’s old blue check system of propagating. But one should know better than to endorse any of Musk’s lies. This is a positive development for democracy and truth, which need each other like Charles and Camilla. It also gives us a chance to look back at why the nearly $45 billion Musk marshaled to elect Donald Trump was so effective—and how we can begin to repair the damage done to the truth and our brains.

Hollowing democracy and shattering journalism

More than two years ago, I wrote about Elon Musk’s plan to break the blue check following the GOP’s underperformance in the 2022 midterm elections.

I’m going to quote it at length because it’s now behind a paywall and it’s probably more relevant now than it was then:

Unless it’s another one of his terrible jokes, all the “legacy” checkmarks that signaled an account had been verified by Twitter will be removed on April 1. The only way for an individual to get a checkmark is to pay the second richest person ever to live $7-$11 to be a member of Twitter Blue, which doesn’t actually verify you, or anyone, but allows you to get priority placement inside the app along with a slew of other embarrassing and barely useful features.

As a business, this product is as bad as Elon’s decision to buy the app.

Twitter adopted the so-called “blue checks” to ward off lawsuits more than a decade ago. As celebrities flocked to the site, they got verified. Eventually, the checks were extended to nearly all working journalists, the symbol became a status symbol, often reviled and revered by the right, forced to reckon with the reality that most celebrities and journalists aren’t raging Republicans.

When Elon first added the checkmark to the Blue product, it was a chance to buy into some legitimacy.

Without any real verified accounts, a checkmark will almost mean the opposite of what it once did. It will mean you’re a sweaty tryhard Elon fan club member desperate for daddy’s love. And the plan to sell checkmarks to businesses at exorbitant rates seems doomed from the beginning.

It’s a comically terrible idea if you’re trying to make money or make up for the hundreds of millions of lost ad revenue Elon seems intent on never recovering. But it’s a genius idea if you want to hollow out democracy and shatter any ability of journalists to be seen as reliable information sources.

While Twitter is one of the smaller major social networks, it plays an outsized role in creating narratives about our political landscape, simply because so many journalists and opinion makers spend so much time there avoiding work.

Imagine the aftermath of the 2020 election, as Trump contested the clear results and fomented the eventual insurrection that delayed the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, without verified news sources. Or with “verified” news sources spreading the sort of wild My Pillow Guy lies that Fox went with, after backlash to correctly calling the Democratic ticket’s victory in Arizona compelled the channel to drool nonsense, like Rudy Giuliani at Four Seasons Total Landscape.

Would that have made January 6 even worse? Who knows?

Now we know.

We must advocate for mindfulness

In a time when the most powerful people alive have weaponized doubt to the point that it threatens the global economy, our fundamental wellbeing, and the entire planet, anything we do deliberately is an act of anti-fascism.

Supporting journalism as much as we possibly can (by at least not complaining about paywalls) is anti-fascism.

Refusing to surrender your brain to algorithms is anti-fascism. Even taking the time to think about algorithms is anti-fascism.

When you trust no one, fear wins

We’ll never be able to repair all the damage Musk has done to Twitter or Zuckerberg has done to Meta with the end of fact-checking on the site.

I believe the rotting of the blue check was one of the key strategies that allowed Trump to return to “normalcy” after the horrors of January 6th and the powerful framing of the January 6th Commission. It has created an information environment that entirely mirrors the second Trump regime, where the biggest freaks become the loudest voices and truth is considered at best a footnote.

We’re all going to falter. In fact, I think I kind of complained about a paywall in this very post, which is bad anti-fascism. But we can create something new. And Bluesky, thus far, has presented an opportunity to be the locus of that something new.

Better digital citizens = better citizens

Reading a guy whose logo has an elephant cleaning himself preach civility may be disorienting to the point of nausea. But taking charge of our feeds and being responsible for what we post and spread are essential acts of resistance right now.

A core of Bluesky users has committed themselves to key principles, like adding alt text to every image for accessibility. Easy verification of a source we’re considering sharing builds on that ethos.

You can also dig into Joshua Friedman’s post to see Bluesky’s Paul Frazee explain how this verification method, like Bluesky in general, is better than what Twitter did.

Don’t like it? You can turn the checks off.

The only hierarchy is truth over lies

I get the feeling that this somehow serves only the already privileged and distinguished online. But the clarity that comes from verification serves everyone who uses the site, including the many people who get news from Bluesky either first-hand or filtered from a writer who gets her news from Bluesky.

“In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act” is something that George Orwell never actually said, apparently.

Knowing that ruins a bit of the fun. But in a time when our brains are being trained to only receive information that serves the platform we’re on and the Cloud Capital behind it, it’s essential to know and spread the truth.