It’s been dumber than average for the past few days on Twitter – and yes, we know, the low bar to cross – like Elon Musk’s 4/20 edict to remove “legacy” verification marks has finally gone into effect. (These are the ones once distributed to users to clarify that they were who they said they were, as opposed to the current system, which uses the blue check to tag paying subscribers to the Twitter Blue service for relentless avoidance.) after the In the Great Purge, however, several famous people started noticing that they had a blue tick anyway, with a false claim that they had paid for Twitter Blue and “verified their phone number” to get the mark. It all started with a few people…William Shatner, LeBron James, Stephen King— and has since spread to a number of big-name accounts and numerous followers.
In his various irritating tweets to parse about it — intercut with videos of his rocket launches which usually omit the bits where the rockets subsequently explode — Musk said he was “to pay for” some celebrity Blue accounts himself. This is usually featured, with Elon Musk’s general “hidden on the something awful forums, but wasn’t funny enough to actually post’ approach to humor online, as a sublime trolling act of its detractors. (Without questioning the basic assumption that Musk is basically admitting that his much-vaunted feature functionally functions as a mark of shame for an enormous number of people.) The end result has been people like Patton Oswalt. looking for ways to get rid of the blue markusually by briefly changing their display name or avatar to bypass the verification system.
The most important user of this type today has, unsurprisingly, been drill, which remains, in many ways, the weird and grotesque heart of Twitter. The hugely popular online comedian, who recently did an out-of-character interview for the first timeand who currently has 1.7 million Twitter followers, had a blue check mark appear and disappear several times on his account today, amid a series of harsh insults at Musk. More recently, by retweeting an article on Lantham’s Lawwhich covers bogus attempts to make it look like someone is endorsing a product – and if we learn US copyright law from a dril tweet isn’t the ultimate indicator of how stupid dril is. ‘today we don’t know what it is.
Wait, actually, we do: he sees the language “subscribe to Twitter Blue and verify his phone number” on the account of deceased actors and performers like Chadwick Boseman And Norman Macdonald, where he appeared today with the returned checks. Current speculation is that blue checks – and possibly just Twitter Blue itself – are being given to anyone with over a million followers on the service. But there’s a particular kind of irritation that comes from seeing beloved deceased celebrities being co-opted into this effort as Elon Musk continues to assert, yet again, that he’s not possessed, he’s not possessed. is not possessed.