Elon Musk knows blue checks are embarrassing now
After trying to establish Twitter Blue (now X Blue) as a super cool status symbol, Elon Musk is now letting paying users hide their checkmarks
Aux News Elon Musk
We all know that what Elon Musk really wants is to be so, so funny all the time. Well, today must be his lucky day because—maybe for the first time ever—he actually is. Well… we’re laughing at least.
After all that really loud hullabaloo around who gets to have a blue check, how much they have to fork over for the privilege, whether the silly little badge of honor (or, you know, the opposite of that) should be foisted on unwitting and/or dead celebrities, what a cool status symbol it is, the “Chief Twit” (Chief X?) has fully changed his tune. And it’s so, so funny. Congrats, E! You did it!
Per a new bullet point on X Blue’s (formerly known as Twitter Blue) about page, the company very quietly announced today that any user currently paying $8 per month for the service’s myriad benefits—which include a short window to edit posts, slightly fewer ads, and, well, mostly the opportunity to display the coveted blue checkmark—can now hide their checkmark if it’s too embarrassing for them (via Variety). Okay, that last part obviously isn’t official copy, but the subtext is quite loud.
The note explains that the checkmark will be hidden on users’ profile and posts, but it “may still appear in some places and some features could still reveal you have an active subscription.” Oh, the horror! Thanks Elon—that’s a knee slapper for sure.
In addition, the note reads, “some features may not be available while your checkmark is hidden. We will continue to evolve this feature to make it better for you.”
So, there you have it: (hopefully) the final chapter of Elon’s long, stupid checkmark journey. Even folks willing to give Twitter/X/whatever they decide to call it next their hard earned cash don’t actually want anyone to know they’re supporting the platform. It’s almost like the blue checks would have been better utilized identifying celebrities, politicians, and other important accounts, but that’s clearly way too radical to actually happen.
114 Comments
Can American just empower the SEC enough to give this Yarpie fuckwit a nitric acid enema already? Or at least hand him over to the Ukrainians?
The SEC has very limited oversight over private companies. Until he does a capital raise and then does something shady their isn’t much they can do. So given the rate that the company appears to be hemorrhaging money, probably in a year or so!
I’m just waiting for the bit where he Carlos Ghosns himself to Saudi Arabia.Or tries to. You know there’ll be photos of Marshals pulling him out of a box labelled “TESLA ENGINE” – and they’ll be the background of every computer and phone I own.
Yarpie, lol.
Someone accused me of racism for using that term for him a while back, but, y’know, if there’s one single class of people you cannot possibly be racist towards it’s Apartheid-enrichened white South Africans.
Agree.
He cares too much about what people think of him. I get everyone cares to a degree, I know I do, but this dude embarrasses himself on an hourly basis with how much he wants the “cool kids” to like him. And it’s so clear he doesn’t think his own fans are cool, he even seems to have contempt for them at times. I always felt the same way about Trump and his fans. I think Trump is embarrassed by his fans but also knows he can’t do better so he gets stuck in a circle jerk with a each other.
Awful man doesn’t like awful people he attracts.
it’s not even that he wants the cool kids to like him, because he already resents anyone who’s actually cool. he wants to be in charge of what’s cool.i’ll always give him a teeniest bit of credit for realizing that electric cars needed to go fast in order to be considered viable by car people (not that he did any of the engineering, of course), but as time goes on it feels more that came to him because someone made fun of him for not being able to drive stick at a party once.
You just know in high school he threw a party at his mansion and absolutely no one turned up.
He didn’t realize anything. The goal of the Tesla people well before he even joined was to precisely to create an electric car that “car people” would be into.This is just more history revision from his effective ousting of the original founders to write himself as one.
He didn’t come up with the concept of a fast EV. And he didn’t found Tesla (although he paid people to say he did).
It just reminds me of like middle school, worst of my self esteem me but just caught in a never ending cycle of self pity self hate and poor decisions, like a self loathing ouroboros. It’s fascinating but probably unhealthy to watch. He’s so lonely and yet has so many kids he’s neglecting. I feel vague pity and disgust at the same time at what he chooses to do as an adult man
“How do you do fellow kids?”
Damnit, those look like the least cool kids ever.
The t-shirt over the oversized collard shirt look really says something about how this man does not have a single person around him that will tell him when he looks like a dumbass
If Hell exists, Elon Musk and Donald Trump will spend all of eternity trapped with their disgusting fans while the mocking laughter of all the people they WANTED to impress rings in their ears.Just an eternity of having to make small talk with MAGA chuds and Crypto Bros while knowing no one of worth ever respected them.
These guys are already in hell. They’re tortured people, if it’s any comfort to us.
And since the world is burning, I’d suggest the rest of us are all there too. I see very little joy right now.
He has SO proven himself to be like Trump! I was discussing with family yesterday if these two had stayed in their own lanes (Trump as a tv version of a “successful businessman” and Elon as the so-called engineering “genius” behind spaceships and electric cars—and I KNOW this was never true, but as long as he was more behind-the-scenes this was the popular image of him) they would have lived privileged lives to the end. Now Trump is surely going to jail one way or another, and while Elon remains obscenely, repulsively rich, everyone beyond his lame fan boys thinks he’s a loser. and his “real life Tony Stark” image has forever been blasted to bits. This seems to hurt him more than anything.
Trump will never spend time inside a jail, or at least inside what any of us peons thinks of as jail. I expect at worst he’ll get some form of house arrest, though part of me thinks there’s a slim chance he’ll be detained in some cushy, high-security facility that’s emptied of any other residents before he’s moved in.
I think he will get house arrest (if he gets convicted) to avoid chaos from his fan base but I also think he is incapable of following the terms of house arrest and they will be forced to put him in a cushy prison and then his fan will become even more unhinged.
Personally I disagree (unless he dies first), though I suspect you’re right about how separated he’ll be from others.
Thank God he can’t run for pres.
Trump outright hates his fans. He’s said as much. But he loves hearing people cheer for him, and he knows it’s the closest he’ll ever get to being respected by the people he does want respect from (ie, NY elites).
He’s mentally a 12 year old who has too much money at his hands and nobody to say not to him… so…
They’re both narcissists. They don’t care what kind of attention they get as long as it’s attention. They both suffer from very low self-esteem which is why they need to constantly pump themselves up by ‘winning’, even if the win is in their own minds. This controlling behavior leads many of them to self-destruction. Unfortunately, they usually take a lot of others down with them. They don’t see it that way, of course. Trump resorts to playing the victim. I don’t know if Musk does that.
2001 called and wants their X back.It is so lame.
Is this a reference to The Jamie Kennedy Experiment? You just got X’ed!
In algebra it’s an unknown quantity.He fancies himself mysterious and inscrutable, I guess.
Also, 2012 called and wants its “Twitter” back!No matter what branding they use, this site is an outdated relic that desperately needs to keel over and die already.
The blue check should never have been tied to a paying sub. It’s that simple.
I kinda don’t get why he didn’t create more different color check marks. I think that he should charge celebrities/influencers/activists to get verified plus certain security protections tied into it. Then do a separate colored check mark for corporate accounts, etc. and charge them for that. And then create a free check mark for emergency services accounts. Make people want to join by making it the place to go to for up to date emergency services information, etc. I personally would have also re-created a Google Reader type thing into Twitter and have it as its own tab. I am not trying to toot my own horn but I think I could have done a better job than Elon Musk and I am a nobody with zero experience with anything like this. lol
Celebrities are the draw for regular people to use Twitter. They’re the content producers. Why should they have to PAY for that?
Because they get something out of it too: a platform to engage with their fans and get new fans in a way that was never possible before. I am not calling for charging them a large amount. But $8.99 so Kim Kardashian can sell squeeze suits doesn’t seem so terrible to me. Plus they would get special security protections against impersonation in mind.
They got all that stuff before, for free, back when Twitter WASN’T the laughingstock of the tech world. Now Twitter has made the blue check effectively worthless, and yet they expect money for it. It’s completely asinine.
Yeah and to keep it he should have charged them. I really don’t see how this is so weird to everyone. Twitter is a tool which celebrities and influencer can use to gain popularity and notoriety. Chrissy Teigen made her whole career based on clapping back at people on Twitter. Both the celebrity and Twitter benefit from it, it isn’t a one sided thing especially for influencers.
……You really, really, really don’t seem to understand how social media companies make money.
Twitter is a tool which celebrities and influencer can use to gain popularity and notoriety
There are a half-dozen other social media sites that do that and none of them charge for the privilege. Besides, Twitter was never really the best place for becoming famous, it was much better for already famous people to make public comments.
And now? No one’s getting famous on Twitter in 2023. People are doing that on Instagram or Tiktok, and then MAYBE they go to Twitter if they feel like it. A lot of the biggest influencers skip Twitter altogether. Elon’s turned it into a cesspool, and even more arrogantly, he expects the only people who give the site value to pay money to wallow in the sewage.
Chrissy Teigen made her whole career based on clapping back at people on Twitter
No, she began her career by being a famous model. No one would have cared about what she said on Twitter if she didn’t have that foundation first. “The hot model you know from the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is making clapbacks” is far more engaging a headline than “some lady is making clapbacks.”
a platform to engage with their fans and get new fans in a way that was never possible before What world are you living in? There’s plenty of alternatives to do exactly what you described and there were plenty even before Twitter existed as well. Twitter didn’t make Kim Kardashian a billionaire and no Twitter isn’t going to drop her net worth. There’s a reason someone like Taylor Swift has 95 million followers on Twitter and 300 million on Instagram. Use your brain.
The reason they created blue checks is because Twitter was liable for impersonations. Tony La Russa sued them. Why the fuck would anyone pay for what Twitter is legally obligated to do?
The payment wasn’t the problem, though. Had Elon’s dictum been, “Verified accounts will now include a charge,” people would have paid — especially the ones who aren’t big celebrities, like New York Times bestselling authors known to their readers but not household names.The problem was opening up paid verification to anyone without actually verifying them.
It’s wild how people will come out and cry “think of the rich people!” over every little thing.
Do you think Elon Musk is poor.
I don’t think Musk is poor but Twitter was never an economically viable company. It actually makes no sense how they have survived this long and even less sense that they have had this level of influence in American culture considering only 20% of Americans are on Twitter and only 2% are active users and 80% of all tweets came from outside the US. (these pre-Musk stats). And the have been bleeding advertisers for a while because of that. (I have a lot of conspiracy theories about how Twitter has survived but I won’t get into that here). If Musk actually wanted to have Twitter to be platform that a lot of people want to use, basically a place to be snarky and communicate without being a total cesspool, it would need to be financially stable company that brings in revenue beyond the fickleness of advertisers.
He certainly isn’t happy.
I am not caping for rich people, you goofball. The point is that they are not going to pay for this and you are very stupid if you think they will. The only people who need Twitter for new fans are “influencers”, who are this era’s greatest bullshitters.
They aren’t gonna pay for it NOW but I do think before he did pretty much every stupid thing under the sun he could have gotten them to pay for it.
But if a Kardashian doesn’t have a blue check then we have surely failed as a society.
Except that’s not what they did. Only pointing out they’re brining in eyeballs for advertisers, ie basically making the platform money before Elon tanked it all with his facism.
I think that he should charge celebrities/influencers/activists to get verifiedBecause they are the product, they aren’t the customer. It would be like charging Lebron James to play in the NBA.
That is a wild comparison. Twitter is a tool influencers can use to gain more influence.
I think you’re confusing influencers with real celebrities. Sure, try to extort Addison D’amelio or other nobodies, but real celebrities aren’t gonna bow to Musk extortion.
Anybody that bought Twitter and simply didn’t fire all the people who keep it running would be a thousand times better businessperson than Elongated Muskrat.
He did, in one of his many pivots. For a while “legacy” verified accounts had a gray check.
It’s like having the most money doesn’t equate to being the most intelligent.
Wasn’t the mass migration to Mastodon, BlueSky, Threads, and various other Twitter-killers of the week supposed to destroy Twitter? It’s almost like Twitter is completely peerless and unrivaled, and users will stay on the platform no matter what Musk does.
Is it? Weird take.
Elon’s never gonna fuck you. He doesn’t even know you exist.
“Wasn’t the mass migration to Mastodon, BlueSky, Threads, and various
other Twitter-killers of the week supposed to destroy Twitter?”It was not. Elon acting like the biggest spoiled manchild is proving to be the winning strat at the moment.
Yep. Dude’s doing just fine tanking it himself.
Man falls from a 100-storey building. Haflway down he shouts: “Doing fine so far!”
people who are already doing something will continue to do that something, but at the end of the day this is a platform funded by advertising and that will continue to dry up.
X marks despot.
Accurate. You know how every fuckwit is giving him kudos for “letting” Ukraine have access to Starlink? (By “letting”, we mean “it’s paid for, same as anyone else”).
He’s been pulling geofencing shenanigans that conveniently cut off access along Ukrainian lines of attack that benefit Russia – this was, of course, after he Big-Brained an edgelord peace plan that conveniently acquiesced to a lot of Russian demands.He really is a cunt.
This article totally glosses over the real “value” of the blue checkmark: Twitter (or whatever) will promote your posts over non-blue checks. You have more reach and visibility.This is huge when you consider who is getting blue checks and who isn’t. All the nazi sycophantic right wing Musk lapdogs who pay their daddy $8 get their posts shoehorned into everyone’s feed and get their replies rocketed to the top of the thread.
In practice it seems like they’re either paying to get in more arguments with regular people or are paying to increase the number of right wing nut jobs they can grift at one time. Yes they get to the top of replies but everyone of them has a bunch of replies of their own telling them how wrong their opinion is and where to shove it. As to the grifters part of me thinks they should just get worse. Eventually they’ll run out of easy marks, the marks will run out of money and/or get disillusioned with the whole thing when putting their “alpha techniques training” into practice lands them in court on harassment charges.
Granted it’s anecdotal since I deleted Twitter as soon as Musk took over, but any time a link to a Tweet gets sent my way, the replies are full of right wing blue checks. I’ll always think to myself “surely someone has called out this person in the replies” but nope, it’s always blue checks spouting bullshit. Again, that’s just what I see, but by Twitter’s own admission, blue checks get preferential treatment in terms of reach (ie. tweets seen by more people) and in replies (moved to the top of the thread).Moving the replies to the top ensures that any non blue check replies might as well not exist. Think of all the times Musk said something stupid and wrong, only to offer a tepid “apology” in some reply to a reply that nobody cares about.
I held on for so long, trying to admire Musk…
Why. He’s always been an asshat.
I dunno, man. Years ago, before he was obviously involved in any kind of culture wars or political bs, he seemed like he was fighting the tech fight to get us closer to the kind of world I’d like to live in. Space exploration, high speed transportation, that kind of thing. I read it as hopeful.
for someone who hates paying for PR he had exceptionally good PR for about 10 years there. the hypothetical, potential elon musk stands in stark contrast to what he’s lived up to be. even things like the high speed rail idea are proven to have just been him trying to eek out free government money.
Yep. Went from Tony Stark to Harry Osborn in under 10 years.
Yep. Went from Tony Stark to Harry Osborn in under 10 years.Harry Osborn’s dad liked him, though.
He really didn’t, despite sharing the same inexplicable hairstyle.
For a second I was ready to ask “Don’t you mean Norman?” A second after that, of course, I remembered that Norman was a guy who actually got shit done – evil shit, but still…Harry, on the other hand, inherited his money, frequently squandered it, and couldn’t even be a halfway-effective Green Goblin.Long story short, yeah, definitely Harry.
Gotta hide the blue checks to make it look like Twitter has more engagement than just the Elon Mafia and white supremacists. All about image, y’know!
What is this article? You’re constantly laughing at Elon Musk but you call him “E” and are concerned about the ramifications here….. I don’t care about what “E” is up to. Find something to report on my gosh.
You mad?
Simmer down Elon.
Elon is welcome to stop making an ass of himself if he doesn’t want people to report on that.
He’s welcome to try but I don’t think he can
When I don’t care about what someone is up to, I don’t click on links specifically about them
So, he fired thousands of engineers and coders, but it seems whoever has the job to keep track of daily whims and rewrite their policy manual has excellent job security.
They’ll be the ones to turn off the lights and lock the doors for the final time, yep.
Sounds more like riding a tiger to me.
Hasn’t the option to hide the blue check been available for like a year now? What’s new about this?
It’s written down on a page.
It hasn’t been a year since he bought Twitter so no
The only thing more embarrassing than a blue checkmark? You guessed it, the “music” of THE SPR3!
I don’t understand why you do this. It can’t be driving much traffic.Walk me through your thinking here.
I almost, almost, admire them for their shamelessness. Not enough to actually click on any of their links, but enough that I don’t flag their comments or anything.
It’s not about “traffic.”Just sharing an audio / visual project with friends. I assure you, THE SPR3 aren’t pulling some weirdo scam like some dirtbag capitalist.
“Wanna pay me $8 but not actually have anything at all to show for it?”
As someone who has never had a Twitter account, watching Elon systematically destroy his new toy has been incredibly entertaining.These are not the actions of a man who had or has a plan.
I had an account long enough to tweet Drew Magary (remember him?) a question for his column. I don’t even remeber what it was. He ignored me so I said “Well, I have no use for this thing.”I don’t feel left out. If there is any subtlety there, I don’t have the time to parse through it.
He still can’t even settle on a name!
He was never trying to make Twitter Blue cool. He was trying to punish the previous class of blue checks, specifically journalists and celebrities, by taking away what he perceived as their special status.
Given that he doesn’t seem to understand or care about the real purpose of verification, even when people pretended to be paying advertisers as a result of his changes, taking away 99% of the journalists’ and celebrities’ blue checks was a big win and all he was really trying to accomplish all along.
Now, instead of being criticized by blue checkmarks, he has them slobbering all over him.Buying Twitter was a lot more expensive than therapy, but going to therapy would mean admitting he’s not already perfect.
He was never trying to make Twitter Blue cool.Correct. He thought people with blue checkmarks were already cool
I think it’s both – he both hates the Twitterati cognoscenti and desperately wishes people like him were seen as cool as they are.Being a neckbeard, he doesn’t embody cultural capital – he’s simply not inherently cool. Being a spoiled brat with zero talent, he can’t earn institutionalised cultural capital. He’s got…what? Half a science degree, a generic biz degree, and like one fuckin’ patent vaguely related to door handles in his name. This leaves him one option: objectified cultural capital, which is how he’s operated all his life. He buys it. X.com (the original), Paypal, Tesla, Twitter – the only way he was involved in those things was because he had money. (Paypal coders regarded him as worse than useless but the fact that he had money meant that he could cosplay as one, just like he now cosplays as an engineer and scientist and Jack Dorsey.)I think he genuinely believes that the Dorsey-era Blue Ticks were cool because they had the blue tick, and not the other way around – that they got the blue tick because they were cool. So if you have a blue tick you must be cool. Even if you bought it.And, of course, his endless legions of mouthbreathers, basement-dwellers, jerking-it-to-Pokemon-hentai self-identified-genius Rootless White Male followers have the exact same philosophy. These the people who get physically shaken when someone doesn’t recognise the importance of the fact they paid $300 for the pre-order edition of Call Of Duty. Of course, I realise that this seems at odds with what you said (how can he both desire something and loathe that same thing?) but he’s definitely not unfucked in the head.
Surprised he’s doing this and not rebranding it to some dweeby X symbol.
So in other words, people are just blocking/muting the blue check irritants that inevitably show up at the top of their replies, and this helps them pretend that that’s not why they’re showing up there.
This is pretty funny, especially after they already erased any distinction between legacy verified folks and subscriber-blue-checks in how the blue check appears in order to try and steal clout from the legacy folks.
It’s as though people are having an identity crisis or something :p
Do you want Sue Dibny murdered? Because that’s how you get Sue Dibny murdered.
Dammit. You made me look.
I give it five seconds before someone makes a browser plugin that shows the blue check anyway. Eight Dollars’ll probably add it in.
This shouldn’t devolve into people accusing each other of having secret blue checkmarks, nope, not the slightest chance of that happening. Twitter was bad enough but now Elon has given it narcs to make it worse. And it’s X now so you can’t even call them some kind of bird pun like the Twitstapo. “Blaze your glory but hide it if people make fun of you.” -Elon Musk
PC Gamer had the best breakdown of his purchase: https://www.pcgamer.com/musks-twitter-meltdown-reeks-of-00s-forum-mod-tantrums/
Finally pressed X on my account after 15 years. Felt nothing.
Coward, I’m riding it out until it either implodes or it becomes a fully paid app. He’ll never get my money but I’m gonna watch this self-immolation from the stands until they kick me out.
On Twitter, I purposely click into the replies of people I know will attract a lot of steaming-caca, and use the blue-checks as a target practice for my block-button.If Muskrat’s algorithm is going to push the worst people in the world up to the top of my feed, then I may as well make lemonade of the situation by getting rid of them en masse.
X Blue? Da fuq?
Not that the checkmarks are necessary, since they’re easy to identify when they spew vile and reprehensible opinions.