Twitter employees solicited bribes for blue checks
The incredulity of buffoons like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the idea of paying $8 a month for a verification badge is baffling when you learn it used to cost much more.
The Twitter ‘blue check’ verification badge has, historically, held significant sway for over a decade on the social media site, and the world at-large. What started merely as a means to prevent imposters from impersonating famous and prominent individuals — presumably even doing damage to their reputation — became a status symbol that separated the Twitter aristocracy from the Plebeian masses. And just like getting into a crowded club that is likely violating fire code regulations by allowing you inside on a busy night, sometimes you just gotta find the right palm to grease.
It all started with a baseball manager by the name of Tony La Russa. A storied name, if you’re a baseball person. Anyone familiar with the game probably knows who he is. He is so famous, in fact, that in 2009 there was a controversy due to someone impersonating him on Twitter. Twitter’s lack of action on the matter resulted in a lawsuit, with La Russa taking the social media giant to task in court over it. La Russa’s contention was that the impersonator was violating his trademark and posting things that could defame him.
Twitter’s actions in the wake of that lawsuit saw the implementation of the now infamous ‘blue check’ verification badge, granted to individuals of particular prominence to avoid any doubt about the veracity of an account associated with those individuals. It soon became a mark of importance and other companies soon implemented similar verification measures to avoid issues of impersonation on their own platforms. Thus the ‘blue check aristocracy’ was born; quite literally separating the ‘Haves’ from the ‘Have-nots’, and granting many perks to those who have that little checkmark — some of them intended, some of them not so much.
The benefits that were intended are of course simply having your account be the ‘official’ account you use if you’re a prominent individual, as well as unmentioned things like preferential placement in the algorithms so that your name/account/channel on whatever platform you’re verified on allows your account to rise to the top, giving an advantage average creators might deem to be unfair to these individuals.
On Twitter in particular it would grant verified journalists, for instance, a leg-up over unverified journalists, making it much harder for independent journalists to garner a following through their work. We know how much highly-placed journalists hate meritocracy, after all. This, of course, also goes for verified news accounts in general. It currently serves as a means to maintain the status quo and give that unfair advantage to brands and individuals that are already established, and making it that much harder for an upstart to get a foothold in a competitive environment, effectively eliminating meritocracy, for the most part.
But as the Machoman Randy Savage so eloquently put it: “The cream will rise to the top.”
So one can imagine, given that the cards are already stacked against the little guy, that endlessly ambitious social media personalities might have been willing to do about anything to get that little check mark of validation, including pay an exorbitant fee for it. And Twitter employees who either were able to verify someone themselves, or had connections with people who could, started dealing verifications like ivory tusks from poachers on the black market to willing buyers.
Sawyer Merritt, a prominent Twitter user with over 300k followers, confirmed the story as well, stating that he was offered verification at a price tag of $16,000 by a Twitter employee.
At a company where even those low on the totem pole are paid over $75k per year, with an average base salary of $118k, one has to wonder why the people responsible would risk jeopardizing their careers. That is, until you remember how the inmates started running the asylum at some point inside Twitter, with a senior engineer by the name of Siru Murugesan admitting that he only worked an average of 4 hours per week and admitted that Twitter ( before Elon ) didn’t care about free speech because they were all ‘commie as fuck’ in his words.
So while I would like to give Jack Dorsey the benefit of the doubt and believe he just lost control, I believe he actively encouraged such a culture at the company and, at least indirectly, helped to foster the conditions necessary for employees to feel so entitled that they denied verification to deserving accounts until they paid a king’s ransom for it.
What a shitshow. Good luck to Elon Musk on cleaning up that mess, though with hyperpartisan hacks like “Head of safety and integrity” Yoel Roth on staff there, who… well, I’ll let this image speak for itself.
I would bet dollars to doughnuts this guy had dirty dealings as well with like-minded individuals in the form of symbiotic relationships to further their damaging ideology. I don’t know for sure what his crimes are at the company, but I remain cautiously optimistic that once he shows Elon where the bodies are buried, in a manner of speaking, that he too will be out of the company.
I keep lobbying for that job myself, but Elon doesn’t acknowledge me. I definitely couldn’t do any worse at it, since I don’t think I could tank the bottom line of the company so far in the red that it bleeds, like Mr. Roth here. Not that I’m blaming him entirely, but given those tweets up there, you can figure that that sort of attitude doesn’t lend itself all that well to ‘best business practices’.
It looks dire, but all we can do is wait and see what goes down at Twitter. Either way, I bet if any of the check mark peddlers are still with the company, they’re mad as hell that Elon lowered the asking price for verification to just $8 a month. Talk about a price cut.
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