Twitter and Democracy: Some Brief Notes
“Oh hail King Musk!” his subjects chant. Twitter has been in the hands of Elon Musk for quite some time now, and we’ve already seen some drastic changes. Most of these changes are good, and some of them are not.
Musk’s democratization of the blue checkmark (in that he is enfranchising anyone willing to pay), a symbol that once denoted not only general notoriety but also prestige—and not meritocratic prestige, but more like “Bow down to me, serf” prestige—will have serious implications for the social media website.
The original concept of the blue checkmark was never the issue. Verifying the identities of real, notable people is a valid goal that ought pursued in earnest. But the previous check mark scheme was an oligarchy that excluded many on an almost completely ideological basis.
As we are seeing, though, democratizing the blue check mark hasn’t been working as planned. As it turns out, letting anyone willing to fork up $8 per month to sport the symbol on their Twitter profile has presented issues with actual verification.
To make up for this, Twitter has tried a variety of methods to keep real, notable accounts denoted as such. First, a gray check mark with the label “Official” was placed underneath all accounts pertaining to some sort of organization, i.e. The Washington Post or The New York Times. Recently, that has been swapped out for a new scheme in which organizations such as those receive an orange check mark so that they are designated as “official businesses” on Twitter.
None of these remedies are necessarily bad, per se. I’ve never been opposed to the idea of multiple check marks of different colors to denote different things, or, rather, different levels of notoriety. What these whimsical changes do show, however, is the futility of democratization as a method for uprooting an oligarchy. In this case, the incumbent oligarchs are the legacy blue check mark class.
The problem here is that Elon Musk is the king of Twitter, and the king has leaked some of his power (or sovereignty, if you will) to the masses in an attempt to uproot and destroy this oligarchy. But because democratization has yielded clear problems regarding the protection of the identities of notable people online, a new oligarchy is already taking shape—one that employs gray “Official” labels and orange check marks to pick and choose who is notable and who isn’t.
In this sense, the Twitter Blue Verified democracy didn’t really exist at all, because the rule of one cannot properly fight the rule of a few by radically enfranchising the multitude. It was never about “the little guy,” how could it be? Even with the standards for verification changing, all the biggest accounts that were just short of verification will now fill the gap.
But there is also another question: What does a man willing to pay $8 per month really have that I do not, aside from a ceremonial check mark with a few perks? What right does he have to rule over me? Perhaps we would do well to heed Edmund Burke’s warning of suddenly uprooting an imperfect aristocracy and replacing it with a newfangled bourgeoisie tyranny.
Nevertheless, the cycle continues.