A verified account managed by PR/SMM is probably better than a scam account of the same person offering you to get rich with this one weird trick.

A verified account of a newspaper is probably better than a fake one, spreading false news about the war in Ukraine, for example.

Managed by PR or not, a verified account stood for the person behind this account, and guarantees this is their (proxy or direct) opinion or a real fact about upcoming event, or information about a past event. Right now a verified account means nothing.

Obligatory mention of r/RealTwitterAccounts. The content at the time of the enshittification of verified accounts have been fantastically funny!

But you are absolutely right, that trust was very important.

Yes because on a Twitter style platform it is those core influencers that are important to the growth and health of the overall network. It is not the random guy with 100 followers, no qualifications, life experience or expertise.

And the point of the original verification system was to make sure you can trust what that person is saying especially in volatile situations e.g. during a crisis where Twitter's role was so influential and important.

I feel like you (and the person above) are missing the whole point of Twitter for many people. I'm not interested in influencers at all, I'm interested in the random guys which often have a lot of interesting life experiences or expertise (shoutout to @foone, for example). And in crisis, video and witnesses from people on the ground are more valuable than second-hand opinionated media rewritings.

People use Twitter in vastly different ways, so it's difficult for each of us to appreciate the uses that others put it to. Even in your case, though, the flaw now is that you don't know if 'verified' accounts are bots, paid actors, etc.

You still don’t want a fake Russian Government announcing nuclear war on Twitter, do you? Of course non-verified accounts had value, but you also want to know if a supposedly official account is the real deal.

> You still don’t want a fake Russian Government announcing nuclear war on Twitter, do you?

Ugh, have you seen Telegram posts by the real Dmitry Medvedev (ex-President, ex-PM, now chairman of the Security Council)? I guess the line between real and parody is pretty thin here.

Besides, anyone falling for the nuclear war announcement on Twitter deserved that. Social medias aren't the trustable channel despite any verifications. What if the real account got hacked?

Banks aren’t trustable organisations despite any verifications. What if your information got hacked?

I believe what you just did is called “moving the goalposts”.

> And the point of the original verification system was to make sure you can trust what that person is saying especially in volatile situations e.g. during a crisis where Twitter's role was so influential and important.

So the elites who we should trust as opposed to commoners that we shouldn’t

Yeah no thanks…

It was to prevent impersonation (a problem that plagues the current version of Twitter).

That is not what the original commenter said, hence my response.

Yes it was extremely valuable; the easiest way to tell is that shortly after Twitter leadership got rid of all legacy verified accounts, they had to frantically add some back. And even then the company lost about 2/3 of its value.

Including adding back dead people murdered by the same people who funded the Twitter buyout. The level of self-awareness surrounding Musk is astonishingly absent.

No, it was elitist and alienating, and people hated them until Elon was in charge, and then we were taught to love them because a bunch of blue check journalists with no followers and no likes instantly turned into journalists with no followers, no likes and no blue checks and lost the delusion that they were important. Then they wrote articles about it.

Imagine a bunch of nominal liberals advocating for royalty, and you have the blue check whiners.

"Royalty". Right. Now you have impersonation accounts of everybody under the sun selling you shitcoins and convincing low-information people that they're real because they paid eight bucks.

This is the angry-for-the-weirdest-reasons thing I will read today, and it is 9:10 AM. Coupled with your post elsewhere in the thread that somehow justifies this as paying to be "part of the conversation", and it only computes as "'tis cope".

What is SMM?

Social Media Manager

Social Media Marketing