Silver badge
Deranged
Twitter before Musk bought it, used to reserve blue check marks for accounts deemed noteworthy and needing protection from impersonation.
This is complete fiction.
They were handed out to anyone "PLU" or showing strong anti-pleb behaviour or the subject of media attention. They were handed out as inducements to attend Twitter presentations. They were handed out to people who knew someone who knew someone in Twitter. I've run across a nontrivial number of anon accounts who just logged in one day to discover they'd magically got a bluetick. Etc etc
There was zero "verification" in the sense the EU is now claiming, for the majority of bluechecks.
What it WAS was a signal that you were "one of the in-crowd". The end.
The EU from the get-go has shown a deranged obsession with the switch of meaning of the blue badge (HEAVILY announced in media and on X) from "SPECIAL!person! Not a pleb!" to "Subscriber". It actually took them quite a while to think up the extra "reasons" of ad info and free database dumping.
Even MORE surreally: X has ACTUAL verified checkmarks for formal entities. Eg government, eg companies. These are not bluechecks, though, so the EU is demanding they be changed to blue.
...
Musk changed all that in a bizarre bid to make blue checks less exclusive, rendering them nothing more than the mark of someone willing to pay for a premium X subscription.
A "bizarre bid" to turn around the catastrophic financial dumpster fire that Twitter was, by doing the "bizarre" thing of... earning money.
I have to say: this is the first time I've ever seen someone try to re-badge "subscription revenue" as "bizarre".
The move led to chaos as paid blue-check accounts impersonated brands, bots multiplied, and users were left unsure who to trust, one of several issues that drew the EU's scrutiny under the DSA.
Of the 3 items here: the last 2 are complete fiction. Charging money for premium service creates bluecheck bots? Other way round. Users are all socially-terrified emotionally-damaged 10-year-olds who believe that the twitter screen is their mummy? Less than 0.3% of X users in Australia are under 16 let alone under 10.
Re the 1st: yeah, a handful of pranksters and ratbags slipped in faster than the brands: verified themselves, subscribed, then changed their usernames. Lasted about 2 weeks. Mostly amusing. The only damage I'm aware of is to the blood pressure of the PR depts in a few companies, on realising they needed to get onto X to claim their brand back.
