If you see a blue tick next to somebody’s name in the future, you know that you can safely block them and move on

Ryan Coogan, The Independent

Well, it’s finally happened. Elon Musk has found a way to strip away the final remaining vestiges of Twitter’s legitimacy, and has turned it into a glorified 4chan that caters almost exclusively to the whims of trolls and bigots. $44 billion well spent, Elon. There have been a lot of takes over the past year that amount to some variation of “no guys, trust me, this is the thing that’s finally going to kill Twitter” (I’m pretty sure I wrote a few of them myself). But I think we might – now, finally – be there.

By not only ending verification for notable users, but essentially flipping the entire system on its head to make it not just useless, but actively harmful, Musk appears to have achieved his dream of destroying a key piece of communication infrastructure that millions of people and thousands of businesses rely on. He’s the real-life Tony Stark, you guys!

If I sound bitter, it’s because I am. I’m always bitter. But I’m especially bitter about this, because I only managed to get my blue tick about three weeks before Musk began his crusade to make it meaningless. I spent years getting freelance articles published, and convincing websites to give me nice author profiles, so that I could finally, finally get a piece of that dank blue goodness. Being “verified” was huge for me, not only because it was a pretty cool status symbol that I could show off to people (why deny it?), but because for the brief period that it actually meant something, it made my a job a lot easier.

When I reached out to commissioning editors, they were much more likely to reply when I had a big tick next to my name that said, “this person is probably not going to scam you”. If I wanted to interview somebody famous, they were way more inclined to get back to me when I had proof that I wasn’t just some crazed fan (even though, in some cases, I secretly was).

That’s actually something that’s true in general about the site. In my previous life as an academic, Twitter was a great tool for networking, and finding out about upcoming publications and events. I went to three international conferences off the back of calls for papers that I saw pop up in my feed, and I even managed to get my work published in a fancy Palgrave Macmillan book because I followed the person who was editing the collection. I left academia a little while ago, but I imagine it’s a lot harder to do that now that the verification symbol has become shorthand for “gullible and bad with money”.

Because make no mistake about it, that is what it means. It’s a scarlet letter that identifies you as a complete mark; a member of the world’s saddest personality cult. Somebody who would pay $8 to help support a website that has been intentionally stripped of the only things that made it useful.

In some ways I guess that’s useful in itself; rather than being a symbol of who you might want to follow, it’s because a signpost for who to avoid. If you see a blue tick next to somebody’s name in the future, you know that you can safely block them and move on. Or better yet, you can just throw your phone in the ocean so you never accidentally open that app again.

It’s why in many ways I’m glad to see it gone. I can’t think of anything more humiliating than having somebody think I’m subscribed to Twitter Blue. Could you imagine? You may as well just get the word “sucker” tattooed across your forehead – it would have pretty much the same effect.

I think the saddest part of all of this is Elon himself. He fully bought in to the idea that verification was some kind of luxury reserved for the “liberal elite”, instead of a utility to reduce impersonation and spam.

Don’t get me wrong, it could sometimes feel a little like the former, but the idea that he would spend tens of billions just to please the jealous dweebs who had bought in to that line of thinking is pathetic to a degree that I’m honestly having difficulty wrapping my head around. In many ways, this whole episode has been a synecdoche for Twitter as a whole, and a metaphor for its owner as a person: embarrassing, broken and completely useless.