Doesn’t matter what the “in the know” understood, it’s what the blue checks perceived it to be. To them it was a hard to get item that only folks with some degree of “celebrity” received.
Boo hoo. Your little blue badge of elitism is now available to the proles, how will you ever cope with such uppityness?
Old blue checkmark: Twitter confirms that this person is who they claim to be. If an account is called DonaldTrump and has a blue checkmark, Twitter confirms it is the account of the former president.
New blue checkmark: Twitter confirms that someone pays 8 dollars every month. If an account is called DonaldTrump and has a blue checkmark, Twitter confirms that someone is paying 8 dollars every month for this account.
So, if you see a tweet from the blue checkmark @DonaldTrump saying "I am running for president", with the new system, you have no idea if the former president has publicly announced he is running again, or if some rando who had 8 dollars to spare wants to make it seem so.
Good! I can’t think of a better way to make Twitter better for the world than to eliminate the elitism.
For what it’s worth, if Twitter eliminated the blue checkmark entirely…the exact same people would be complaining about that too. It’s their special celebrity badge that separates them as “valid” from the little people.
Musk doesn't understand the platform he bought, so he promised to change the existing identify verification system – part of a strategy to combat impersonation and misinformation – to a pay-for-play subscription feature.
But Twitter already has a subscription offering! He's just ruining the verification system out of ignorance and spite.