Elon Musk’s Twitter Verification Fiasco: What Now?

It was a busy weekend on Twitter. Suddenly, all my cohorts had lost their blue check, while mine remained. “Why do you still have a blue check,” they asked. “You’re not a formerly suspended Onion ripoff, or a dead celebrity gifted with the badge. You must be paying for a subscription!” The shame set in. I panicked. What was once a point of pride had become a scarlet letter. What could I do to rid myself of this gangrenous appendage!? In my private message group, I admitted the truth before discovering the way out (like Chrissy Teigen). “No, in case there’s any confusion, I did not buy my status,” I said. “I’d been verified for nearly a decade, but I had — before Elon’s trainwreck of a Twitter takeover — subscribed to Twitter Blue for the extra features; by paying a small fee I could post entire video interviews, instead of a two minute and twenty second clip.” But now that subscription was a stain on my good name. As Alex Kirshner writes in Slate, “the real reason most people, and especially those of us who used to be verified, do not want the new check mark is… because having the check mark circa late April 2023 is embarrassing.” Oof.

So, I went to the settings section to cancel my membership. Must be done on desktop. I flipped open my laptop and did just that — only to find that the verification icon would remain until the payment period concluded. Now what!? Already, #BlockTheBlue was trending, and people I know were participating; soon, my reach would dwindle for the very reason it had long been amplified. 

Then it hit me: Ever since Musk took over there has been a little warning label within the UI stating that if you change your name (not even your @username) or profile picture, you’ll (temporarily) lose your Twitter verification status (as what remains of the security team ostensibly re-confirms your identity). For that very reason, I hadn’t changed anything but a few words in my bio since that message first appeared. But, overnight, losing my verification was the goal. I changed my display name — and, lo and behold, my blue check disappeared. “It’s gone,” I DMed the group. “You can’t make fun of me now!” Phew. No, seriously:

Verified account Unverified account pic.twitter.com/6MLJWU6sAV

— Elad Nehorai (@EladNehorai) April 21, 2023

Twitter Verification: What Does It Mean Now?

Elon Musk literally killed the Twitter influencer. Although Meta (and the also unpopular Mark Zuckerberg) introduced paid verification subscriptions around the same time, there hasn’t been a similar uproar about Facebook or Instagram. Why? Simple. Whereas Meta’s paid option has even been lauded by some for democratizing verification for micro-influencers (who can afford to pay the fee), Twitter’s policy change dropped amid a torrential downpour of poor decisions impacting:

• The safety and wellbeing of the majority of Twitter users
• The very viability of the platform for digital businesses, advertisers and non-political influencers

Kirshner breaks it down, pulling no punches:

How did the Twitter check mark become toxic? It took multiple strokes of business failure: first, by Musk making Twitter worse; second, by charging more for Twitter Blue at the same time that he was making the site worse; and third, by making himself an unappealing person for people to associate themselves with in public. The masses are not balking at paying for Twitter Blue because they’re trying to shelter themselves within a crumbling elitist internet order but because they think Musk is offering an unworthy product and is also a dickhead.

Even with all of Zuckerberg’s questionable political allegiances and appearances before Congress, the Meta chief hasn’t ruined his personal brand by posting played-out memes and exposing his own ‘alt’ account on his own platform. When social media users think about Instagram or Facebook, they think about their stories and reels, trending topics, keeping up with friends and family, the in-app shopping, influencers, and brand giveaways; when social media users think about Twitter, they think about verified bots, keyboard warriors and raging anti-Semitism and transphobia. They think about: 

• NPR abandoning the platform after being labeled “government-funded media” 
• The popularity of accounts run by the likes of Kyle Rittenhouse (with a million followers, his claim to fame is killing two people at a protest)
• The breadth of verified bot disinformation campaigns
• The deluge of random tweets flooding out posts from people they know and follow

Confirmation came March 31, 2023, when the leading nonprofit defender of digital privacy and free speech released a report demonstrating “why Twitter was socially valuable… and isn’t anymore.” 

In regard to Twitter’s public utility, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) writes:

Twitter has always punched above its weight in the importance vs. size/profitability leagues. Twitter’s emphasis on unfiltered sharing of text — rather than audio and video material that has a higher bar — made it an easy way for important people to put out statements. The utility of this was demonstrated early in the platform’s history, when it was used by Egyptian demonstrators to get the word out about events on the ground in January 2011. 

Twitter has also historically outpaced larger competitor platforms as source material, with its “popularity among journalists [leading] to tweets being cited with disproportionate frequency.”

Disproportionate because, relatively speaking, Twitter is small — like 600% smaller than Facebook and even smaller than Pinterest small. Accordingly, the brands and influencers that/who have maintained a presence on Twitter, whether organically or via paid promotions, have done so not because of enormous impression numbers or impressive click-through rates but because of who uses Twitter. 

Twitter was all about access. And Twitter verification meant prestige, as well as transparency and accountability — because the Twitter algorithm was designed to promote the most trusted content and sources. “The context of a trending topic, whether someone was verified, or how a tweet was published is also important for research and reporting. All of that is now gone.”

Not only that, Twitter’s other “good qualities — features and practices that many users all over the world came to rely on — are all but gone now” too. According to EFF, pre-Musk Twitter: 

• “Had an admirable commitment to transparency and standing up for its users”
• “[Did] a better job of content moderation… tend[ing] to err on the side of labeling objectionable content rather than removing it”

What’s worse, warns Juliette Kayyem in The Atlantic, is that “the social-media platform’s crisis has become a real-world crisis.”

This is going to be chaos for emergency services pic.twitter.com/KWH08cEO6i

— Marc-André Argentino, PhD (@_MAArgentino) April 20, 2023

Twitter, Society, and the Musk Effect

Scott Hechinger, a civil rights attorney and founder and executive director of Zealous, a national advocacy and education organization, agrees. “None of this is funny,” he Tweeted April 22. “Musk has purposefully destroyed one of the most effective tools of local movements & advocates to be heard & connect with journalists, decision makers, & those with power to amplify critical messages and perspectives.” I, for one, met Hechinger on Twitter, where he shares information multiple times a day for his following of 123,000 (and their followings and so on).

To put it bluntly, Musk turned a valuable tool for global communication, emergency response and branding into what’s been called a “hellscape” of fascist pontification. (Elon Musk, himself, engages daily with far-right conspiracists while covertly removing sections of its hate speech policy and banning the accounts of mainstream tech journalists based on advice from someone whose tweets inspired a mass shooting.) 

In other words, Musk’s attempt to recover that 50% loss in value looks not like a strategic business decision but a last-ditch effort to save something that he truly never understood and always intended to leverage for personal, superficial gain (rather than shareholder profit or user experience). 

Turns out, this is bad for society and for business: 

• Twitter, purchased by Musk for $44 billion, is now valued at $20 billion
• Tesla’s value has dropped $582 billion since Musk’s Twitter purchase, spurring a harsh, formal letter of complaint from the board
• The mid-launch explosion and subsequent grounding of SpaceX’s maiden voyage — along with another bad Tesla earnings report — cost Musk nearly $13 billion of his own fortune

In Kirshner’s words, Musk’s latest Twitter fiasco was “a weekend-long master class in business failure.” Twitter’s removal of legacy verifications officially commenced Thursday, April 20, 2023, and by April 22 the platform had collected a total of only 28 Twitter Blue signups. Twenty eight! On a platform with 450-million users. That’s a percentage of 0.000006222%. But that wasn’t even the worst of it. 

Musk decided to “pay for” the verification of certain celebrities, without their permission, even going so far as to label their newly returned verification badge as having been paid for (by them, not him). Needless to say, Lebron James, Stephen King, Lil Nas X and Jason Alexander, among others, weren’t happy. 

Then there was the case of Matt Binder, who was seemingly verified for leading the charge against Musk; the unannounced and shameless verification of deceased celebs; and the sudden change of heart to re-verify everyone with a million or more followers — an outright contradiction and condemnation of all the populist ideals Musk has historically espoused. (Uppn announcing his bid to purchase Twitter, for instance, Musk declared, “Having a public platform that is trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.”) 

Nevertheless, Musk is simultaneously:

• Giving gold verification status (for “official organizations”) to his favorite bands and far-right international political parties
• Mocking foes on their own profile pages
• Requiring established news agencies and brands pay $1,000 per month for the ‘honor’

can’t imagine why brands would want to stay away from advertising on a site where they have the opportunity to be openly mocked by the site’s owner so he appeal to its middle school brained users pic.twitter.com/SKhaoODKMS

— Matt Binder (@MattBinder) April 18, 2023

‘I Don’t Care About the Economics at All’

At the time of Musk’s initial pitch to Twitter’s founder, former CEO and shareholders, the world’s richest individual admitted to not “car[ing] about the economics at all.” Not shocking, considering the economics are bad — with the financial forecast and in-app user experience even worse. 

Hats off to the more than one-million Twitter users who quit in the first five days of Musk’s ownership, as well as the 50% of top Twitter advertisers that fled almost immediately; you prognosticators sure dodged some bullets. We were right to be fearful of the man who once promised to solve world hunger; his high-class electric automobiles require lithium mining and catch on fire, after all.

As we learned before the purchase, Musk did recognize that the Twitter he was inheriting was already a cybersecurity concern (to put it nicely), but instead of improving Twitter based on reputable third-party findings, it feels like the boy-genius is tinkering around with the controls of a nuclear reactor. 

That’s why Microsoft dropped Twitter from its advertising platform on April 19:

• One day after Musk spoke at a marketing and advertising conference “to lure brands back to the platform”
• One day before Musk kicked off his chaotic crusade to reclaim verification — further alienating the very same brands he’s supposedly striving to court

That’s why your engagement is down, and spam replies are up. That’s why your social media team is scrambling to adjust policies, processes and priorities. And that’s why, if you’re still running ads on Twitter, you’re likely seeing diminishing returns and even some unsavory customer feedback.

10 Tips for Mastering Musk-Era Twitter

I asked Nancy Levine Stearns, an author, journalist and longtime Twitter user who attended NYU Stern School of Business, what Musk’s moves mean for brands. “Business school textbooks are filled with exactly the sort of brand catastrophe that Musk is engineering,” she replied. 

My advice? When it comes to Twitter:

1. Maintain your brand presence (i.e., don’t delete your account)
2. Do not pay for verification
3. Post a public statement sharing your brand’s strategic approach to using Twitter, along with a reaffirmation of your commitment to customer centricity on and off the app
4. Include links to your website and other social media accounts in your profile, and update your header/banner to include your other social media handles
5. Do not pay for advertising or boost your posts with paid promotion
6. Continue to post the types of content that have historically generated the highest engagement
7. Survey current and past customers, leads and prospects about their social media preferences and activities,with specific questions about brands, advertising and UX on Twitter
8. Adjust your social media strategy and tactics to align with changing customer and consumer behaviors and sentiments
9. Keep an eye on changing Twitter policies, new third-party Twitter research, escalations in spam or hate speech, and Elon Musk
10. Focus on users, leads and customers, as opposed to platform-specific trends, ensuring your social media manager(s) and/or coordinator(s) aren’t only digital marketers but experts in UX, lead nurturing, CX, tech support and even sales

Image Credits (in order of appearance) 

1. Photo by Stephen Radford on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/hLUTRzcVkqg
2. Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/5psJeebVp9o
3. Photo by Ali Tareq on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/PCEOEThkXnw
4. Photo by Bill Jelen on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/lDEMa5dPcNo
5. Photo by Barefoot Communications on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/z2M7JefmTEw