Around eight years ago, I received my verified Twitter check mark while working as a cub reporter for a digital news outlet. I didn’t do anything to earn it, but one day I showed up to work and saw that I had been verified. It was a sweet surprise!
(Technically, the check mark was white with a blue border, but they’ve become colloquially known as blue checks, and I’m not going to argue over semantics now.)
Looking back, it feels a little pathetic how excited I was about getting a check mark. However, at that time, digital journalism was still fighting to be taken seriously, and having that check mark denoting that Twitter had confirmed the identity of the account’s owner and operator gave me credibility.
Last week, Twitter began removing check marks from previously verified accounts whose users had declined to pay a fee, which was most of them. Now, anyone can be “verified” on Twitter for $8 a month, but it comes with basically none of…
2023-04-30 06:38:02
Source from www.nytimes.com