The truly corrupt
Makes no sense.
Literally zero sense.
His new blue tick is simply a thing you buy. You pay $8 a month, it’s yours. It means nothing.
The old blue tick was a verification of identity and (at least sometimes) “notability.” It was free, and it required documentation.
How is the second “truly corrupt” and the first not corrupt?
Maybe I’m overthinking this. Maybe to him “corrupt” just means “not giving Elon Musk money.”
It’s an interesting example of path dependence messing things up.
Today the “blue check mark” blurs together two features:
1) authenticating that certain notable accounts genuinely are who they purport to be and not impostors, parodies, coincidentally named people, etc.
2) giving certain users special account features or abilities.
The only logical connections between these is that it might be in Twitter’s interest to give notable accounts those special features just to encourage them to post more content, which drives traffic to Twitter and encourages engagement. But you could easily imagine not doing so for some or all such accounts, and likewise it makes perfectly fine business sense to make (2) a premium for-pay feature just like many sites have.
The problem is that (1) started as a perfectly self-interested thing for Twitter to do — it makes Twitter more useful if users can tell whether that account is “really” a particular famous person, business, organization, etc. — but somehow morphed in many people’s eyes into a status symbol. So then some people began resenting “blue checks” and envying them.
So along comes Elon and decides that he can gain revenue by offering blue checks to anyone willing to pay, which then waters down the relevance of blue checks, which is a feature in the eyes of many of Elon’s fans because that really sticks it to those uppity blue checks.
But that just takes you back to the original problem of how users can determine which accounts are real and which are fake, which is an actually important thing Twitter is throwing away with this policy. Of course, they could have avoided this by making the paid premium Twitter account a “gold check” or something that operates independent of “blue check” status, but that wouldn’t sell as well — the people paying to subscribe to Twitter want the (perceived) status benefit of being a “blue check,” not some nouveau riche gold check!
Inevitably, blue checks will cease to mean anything other than “I pay to use this app,” and whatever cache it has among some users will fade, so this is a short-lived strategy at best.
Elon regarded the old system as “corrupt” in the sense of awarding blue checks to relatively not-notable people who had the right opinions and withholding them from much-more-notable people who had the wrong opinions.
Screechy is also right that the new blue checks will no longer be about “cachet” but will be about extra features and (possibly) algorithmic advantage to the account. That is what you’d be paying for.
Note that there are also now grey and gold checks to do the job of identifying businesses and organisations. (There is now no way of identifying a notable person, except by their bio and follower count, though note that impersonation is against Twitter rules. Musk has said they are mulling this issue over and may do something to verify notable people.)
By using Musk’s first name, Coel seems too be trying to give the impression that he’s a personal pal. I confess to not understanding the libertarian desire to grovel before anybody who has made a lot of money, whatever their character & behaviour. But here’s a tweet about our Elon by Keith Olberman, which Coel will probably discount because of its provenance:
What an absolutely embarrassing asshole @elonmusk is.
Insists Twitter had shadow-banned him; engineer presents data people are just losing interest in his tweets; he FIRES ENGINEER.
Just a petulant, moronic child. https://t.co/RU8cKs2y6m
— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) February 9, 2023
You can read the whole piece about Musk’s sacking of all but yes-men at RAW STORY.
I’m going to engage in a bit of guilt by association character assassination here but Coel seems to only be interested in defending rightoid and other people who attack his political enemies with no principles whatsoever… I mean, how many times has he been bringing up Christopher Rufo who amongst other things was involved with the Discovery Institute. The endless “standing” (ug, Zoomer speak) of the countries worst people is absolutely reprehensible, especially considering what they want to do to atheists, gays, and women.
It’s notable that Musk is the best person that he defends…
Here’s a quote from the article linked above by Tim Harris:
Sound familiar? Sounds like Trump’s schtick. If neither of them had oodles of dollars, who would pay any attention to them? They’d be cranks, nobodies. It stands to reason that they just happen to be nobodies with lots of money.Money doesn’t by brains or talent, but it does attract sycophants, toadies, and yes-men who will jostle for scraps, so long as the gravy train’s running.
Interesting. Thanks Tim!
@Blood Knight:
Interestingly, my post didn’t “defend” Musk, it simply answered Ophelia’s question as to how Musk sees things, and the rest of it was simply factual.
Interesting that this gets interpreted as “groveling” to Musk. There’s a lot of both good and bad in Musk (as with everyone), but the hating on him is rather silly. There’s way too much tribalism here. We’re likely better off with Musk running Twitter, than it was previously, so I give him credit for that.
And he’s not “rightoid” (“person on the fringes of authoritarian right-wingdom”). Come on, he voted Obama, Obama, Clinton and Biden in the last 4 elections. Rightoid? Maybe pause and wonder why he (and many) have got disillusioned with today’s left, with its rejection of reality, truth, fairness and rejection of equal opportunity as an ideal?
People do understand that it’s possible to have an opinion about someone that is somewhere inbetween “he’s 100% perfect”, and “he’s 100% bad”, don’t they? Which brings me to …
Yep, for a long time I was very wary of Rufo, given that he is a right-wing Christian linked to the Discovery Institute (and indeed I still am). But he has been doing a very good job of documenting a lot of the idiocy about CRT and gender ideology that has infiltrated schools (people leaking stuff to him and him publicising it).
Yes, I give him credit for that. Am I obliged to get all tribal and reject everything he does just because he’s a Republican-voting Christian?
Would it be better if leading Democrats were pushing back against ideological indoctrination in schools and universities instead? Yes please, that would be really good.
And if anyone doubts just how bad things are getting in some schools and some parts of academia in the US, have a read of this article: A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell, by Vincent Lloyd.
[About the author, if it matters: “I am a black professor, I directed my university’s black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition.”]
Coel – To be fair, and with all due acknowledgement of tribalism, surely Musk’s behavior (what we’ve seen of it via Twitter at any rate) is pretty bizarre? I don’t think I had any political or tribal opinion about him at all before the takeover, apart from maybe the tribal suspicion of billionaires. But he’s been saying, and reportedly doing, some quite eccentric things.
The article is interesting – Lord of the Flies meets a seminar.
I am unimpressed by Coel’s evasions. It was not so long ago that he was lauding Elon (shall we call him?) merely for the reasons that he shook up things, something that impresses readers of Ayn Rand (Trumpians I know supported Trump for the same reason), and that he was ‘successful’ (something that appeals to philistine libertarians who appear to think that the only important thing in life is the accumulation of wealth and power). I have no respect for a man who alleges that a diver who helped save a number of Thai boys trapped in a cave by flooding was ‘a pedo guy’ because he (the diver) pointed out that the submarine that Elon offered would be useless. Nor have I any respect for a man who cheerfully re-tweets allegations about Nancy Pelosi’s husband having invited a rent-boy into the house in his wife’s absence. As for the ‘shaking up’ of things, Elon’s ‘shaking up’ of Twitter has not, and is not going well, for fairly obvious reasons. The man behaves like a thoroughly spoiled small boy. It really is not a matter of ‘hating on him’, as Coel would fondly like to believe.
I have read the article by the black professor, and was appalled by it (assuming that everything that is said is accurate, which I have no reason to doubt; and certainly what was written had the ring of authenticity & honesty). I also have small time for the excesses of what we might call ‘wokery’, but equally I have small time for the excesses of those who rail against serious books such as Padraic Scanlan’s ‘Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain’, Sathnam Sanghera’s ‘Empireland’, or ‘Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War’, and whose predecessors’ attitudes led to Eric Williams’ book ‘Capitalism & Slavery’ not being published in Britain from an important publisher until over 80 years after it was written; and who rage about the National Trust pointing out that many of those country houses in Britain that visitors love to go around were built on profits that came from slavery; and I have no time for the present obsession, particularly in Florida, of removing from school and municipal libraries books that are deemed by ignoramuses who have probably never read a serious book in their lives to be subversive – particularly where matters of race are involved.
I find the attitudes of both the extreme ‘woke’ brigade and the extreme ‘anti-woke’ brigade disgraceful and dangerous. Both are uninterested in truth or in reality. And I find difficult to respect someone who will only look at one side, and spend his time obsessing over ‘wokery’ and pretending that the sort of extreme represented in Vincent Lloyd’s article is representative of anyone who would like to see a fairer society both in the UK and the US, as well as elsewhere.
@Ophelia:
Absolutely, Musk is indeed very eccentric with behaviour that could properly be described as “erratic”. He clearly thinks differently from “normal” people. (He self-IDs as having Aspergers.)
He also very much has a micro-managing, tinkering, shoot-from-the-hip style. His method is to try things out on-the-fly and if they don’t work then do a U-turn. All this was said about him long before Twitter. (He has called himself a “nano-manager”.)
People might regard all this as severely sub-optimal …
… but then you have to factor in his record of building up a string of major companies (PayPal then Tesla and SpaceX, plus Neuralink, plus the Boring Company, and then there’s OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, also founded by Musk). Any one of those alone would be a major achievement.
Who else has done anything comparable? Most other self-made billionaires owe it to striking lucky with a single company. And people were predicting that Twitter would have fallen over in a heap by now, which it hasn’t, it seems to be doing fine.
Musk’s behaviour does begin to make more sense once you realise his motivations, which he openly tells us about.
His habit of “thinking aloud in public” may be sub-optimal and has got him into trouble and law suits several times, but perhaps someone with his record would necessarily be an eccentric character who sees things differently than most people.
@Tim Harris #11:
I don’t think your comment merits a reply, do you?
Coel: I found your comment somewhat appropriate but at the same time your snide dismissal of Tim Harris shows the kind of problematical thinking his comment addressed.
As for Musk, your Randian idea that he and he alone did all this is questionable in itself. Large corporations are not one man working in a laboratory dimly lit by a flickering candle while We howls and gibbers outside.
the whole idea that people should sacrifice their lives, everything, for f&@)# Twitter of all things is pretty risible.
Hi Brian:
His comments are pure misrepresentation and strawmanning along with snide attacks. He exemplifies unthinking tribalism such that anything that isn’t a 100% condemnation of Musk must therefore be 100% praise of him amounting to “grovelling”.
Actually, my comments here about Musk here have been pretty neutral and factual. None of his comment related to anything I’d actually said, so why would it merit a reply?
I’m baffled as to how you could reasonably interpret my comments as implying that. Major companies do indeed consist of more than one person.
But if you don’t agree that Musk has been exceptional in building up a string of major successful companies, often in very different areas, then go ahead and name some comparable entrepreneurs.
A little more on our talented Elon from an article titled ‘Inside the Hell of Working as a Social Media Content Moderator’ in the Byline Supplement:
‘Content moderation is often misunderstood. If you listened to new Twitter boss Elon Musk you might assume its main role is to limit freedom of speech – one reason why he recently fired an estimated 3000 content moderators. But for those actually involved with moderation, it’s about making social media actually usable rather than filled with a never-ending stream of death threats, child porn and human corpses, even if the manual work behind it all is largely ignored by employers and users alike.
***
‘Just this week, a judge in Kenya ruled that former outsourced Facebook moderator Daniel Motaung could take the tech giant to court over his treatment, having been paid £1.80 an hour to sift through posts including beheadings and child abuse.’
I should add that the whole article is well worth reading, since it draws attention, among other things, to the kind of things those doing outsourced labour have to put up with.