Twitter is planning to start charging $20 per month for verification

why do you need some blue tick next to your handle?

Is what a priority? Keeping our blue ticks? Well, the purpose of the blue tick was originally to show that the person was someone of note and not a random anon user or impersonator, and to authenticate that. They had specific criteria to meet.

Journalists from lower income countries, for instance, are still journalists, but they don't usually make enough money to pay $240 per year to justify keeping that badge. You may not think it necessary. That's fine.

How this measure fights against bot ?

From my own experiment with twitter, verified account were mostly real human. And I don’t care much about them. As individuals they are sensitive to human connection and relationship.

The real issue here is the millions of fake account, managed by only a few human, adopting an aggressive herd behaviour: - coordinated mass harassment - coordinated mass report - coordinated mass insulting - coordinated mass influence - coordinated mass retweet/like to cheat those indicator of social credibility.

The c19 Covid was a very good time to observe such phenomenon.

As a French and having sympathy to Dr Raoult, for being at the first line of diagnostic and treatment, I had to fight with thousand of such accounts, acting in a temporal and geographical coordination on those specific topic to build ressent, create confusion, and discredit the communication of the official account of Dr Raoult.

Those account were always pretty similar in their twitter history, before becoming the finest of finest of epidemiology specialists, they were tweeting mostly: - soccer game, with affiliate link to bet website - computer gaming relaying mostly affiliate link to some online lottery to win a brand new graphical card from famous website.

Those two elements were 99% of their original content, often less than 100 tweets on the course of several years. But their “reply” content started to be active at the beginning of the epidemic and since then represented 100% of their activities.

Similar profile picture, similar wording in bio, What was funny is that in the following months I identified others subgroups of twitter bots With different history of “influence attempts”.

For instance it is well known that our president Macron online strategy was heavily based on Telegram top-down communication and order passing.

In political meeting, all the supportive crowd was connected to telegram chat room and were asked to join them before the event to coordinate crowd reaction during the meeting.

Once those groups were built, the online herd activity started with the apparition in the months before election of numerous similar accounts on twitter, all reacting to online twitter content about Macron, in same way with similar phrasing if not identical phrasing.

Lately I demonstrated with twitter search function, this behaviour by identifying almost 20 accounts exactly twitting the identical same phrase in reaction of a journalist about to release big news about Eric Zemmour.

So basically, the fake account and bot aren’t on the side of “verified account”, but only on the side of individuals, collective, lobbyist farming millions of fake account and either for money, or ideological passion they misbehave and manipulate the opinion of the tweeter crowd for specific purpose.

For instance and for those who can understand the reference, twitter is the perpetual modern replay of The most known form of injustice and crowd manipulation: the judgement of Jesus Of Nazareth by Ponce Pilate. Many fails to understand the this judgement was the birth of civilisation, as far as Christian civilisation is deeply tied to notion of justice and fighting against the essence of tribalism, double standard, and crowd justice from mass hysteria.

From this point of view twitter is the most powerfull weapon against civilisation as the biggest destroyer of Justice, and the biggest agitator of crowd.

To conclude, how this measure will fight against state level influence on twitter such as the well known Hasbara tactics with civilian/military hybridation for supporting Israel, and it’s online perception worldwide.

For instance, creating fake account, acting in coordination to support Israel politics, especially about Palestinian to reshape positively the feelings toward Israel is mandatory to obtain official degree in isrealian university, and supervised by Israeli military structure.

Addendum: the biggest move Elon Musk could do, and also the easiest to performs: remove ignore/block button and all block lists associated to any account. This also will have the advantage to spare a few MB of data on twitter DB, and diminished the load to filter the content of each account filtering their social feed.

A related question I have is, what happened to everyone who held stock at the moment it was taken private? For large shareholders, ok, you can make a deal with them. But if I'm an employee or even just a random guy who keeps, say, $30k or $300k worth of Twitter stock, what happened to those people and their stock? Was it forcefully exchanged for cash in their Robinhood or Fidelity accounts? How does that even work?

> Most people are going no where

Many people will peace out if their job makes them feel stressed and insecure. They have options and remote work makes it even easier to both interview (on Twitter's time) and switch to a new job (the world is your oyster and job changing friction is minimal).

> and those that leave will be replaced immediately.

Twitter is gonna have a hard time differentiating itself as a job now. Why work for Elon who treats people like this? Maybe that one somewhat niche political/ideological faction in software will be more likely. Lifestyle devs (most of them)? Nah - there's 10 chiller options out there.

I don't think there's enough true believers out there to sustain even normal dev turnover of 1-3y. Maybe Elon will have to pay even more money on salaries to stand a chance. Or he'll give up since he seems a little Dunning-Kruger on this venture as SV CEO.