Even before the takeover accounts could be "unverified", which makes a mockery of the concept of verification.
Why? Accounts can be sold/hacked, and there is a lot of that on social media. A verified account may even be a higher value target for some of the reasons you're bringing up, like algorithm boosts, verifications being considered an endorsement. In either case, unverification not only makes sense, but should be expected.
I'm talking about people, who are still verifiably the same people, becoming unverified.
Yes, where accounts have changed hands, or changed identity, they should be unverified.
That's actually one of the cases where twitter did not un-verify. Accounts "earned" the blue-check then changed identity to something else, appearing "verified" as that new identity.
If that's what you were talking about, you should have said that. Accounts are not people. This is not pedantry (and calling me names doesn't prove anything, either).
If I’m able to register a company with a name that matches your username, should I be able to get a verified account with the handle “real_xnorswap”?
Such things could be ripe for abuse. Although to be fair a social media platform might be able to push some of the blame onto the corporate registries.
If you're not claiming to be me, then I can't see why you shouldn't be able to use the name xnorswap, especially if that's your company name. I don't own the name, and if you have your own presence under that name, I can't see the issue.
Even trademarks only cover a company's particular domain. See the long history of Apple Corps vs Apple Computers
In my view this is how verification ought to work:
- A user writes a bio / about field
- A trust provider verifies that bio is factual
- Any change to that bio will cause their bio to become unverified until it can be re-verified. ( The bio change can be held back until verification can complete. )
- An appeals process exists
How "trust providers" are established without leading to excess centralisation is a difficult problem. This is especially true given that like moderation, it's an expensive thing to do.
There is the possibility of trust-chains such as the way Lobsters works, but there's a exposed to the masses I suspect that people just mass-verify everything without any checking.
In reality you'd be left with one or two central pillars that people trust, and everything else which people don't.
There's also the danger that too much verification leaves new users in the cold. If 90% of genuine users are "verified", then a brand new user doesn't have much chance of making it through filters to become known enough to hope for verification, and will find themselves ignored and effectively locked out. ( This is already the case for some platforms where you're effectively required to give your phone number else end up in the "probably a bot" pile and de-facto shadow-banned. )
There's a pretty good retrospective written up on this blog[0].
In short: originally the purpose was nothing more "this account belongs to the person they claim to be and we've directly verified this with them". Unfortunately, people habitually misinterpreted the checkmark as not just being verification but also a tacit endorsement of the account by Twitter the company. Which isn't great when you get a high profile controversial event and it's lead organizer has a verified Twitter account.
After that, they appended an "in good standing" qualifier, and it quickly devolved into a "you know a person who knows a person who knows a person" situation since they also announced a public pause of the program. (Notably, the ID check, while it existed, was pretty much abandoned. Twitter at some point began demanding ID scans to report things to their support, but that obviously never actually translated to a blue check.)
Musk's version of it is hilariously simplistic, but also robs it of any and all value: just pay money for it and you'll get it. It works in the sense that it confirms the poster has a bank account (although this probably doesn't confirm much in and of itself), but any and all value of said verification is minimal because any old hack/scammer can do that.
Verification is a difficult system to get right and people have all sorts of pre-baked in ideas on how it should work versus how it actually works and the use of a checkmark played a part into how Twitters version was perceived over the years. (As well as Twitters own unreliability in being consistent about what it means.)
Huge swathe of accounts who got in early and had friends at Twitter got verified and had priority standing in algorithms and moderator reports just based on that not on the merit of their posts.
Oh you could also pay Twitter employees $20K under the table to be verified too.
It started well with good intentions and the initial rollout solved the problem. It then turned into a status symbol and hidden caste system. When Elon took over and turned it into a game, all cred was lost.
It was a "hidden caste system" with no real consequences for people's interaction with the platform. I have approximately zero sympathy with the "anti-bluecheck" resentments that Musk tapped into.
When Elon took over; the rules were clearly laid out: buy your checkmark for $7/month (not sure of the price). Pay and you get it; stop paying and you loose it. Everybody knows exactly what it means.
Before that it was: "Someone will give you the checkmark if they like what you say enough and/or if you are deemed 'popular enough' according to an obscure committee; likely a combination of both. But there is a certain threshold above which it does not matter what you way, and you will always be verified". You could loose your checkmark on the whim of some dude who got his latte order wrong in the morning. No one was ever given the rulebook. In fact there was no rulebook. Checkmark just meant "I went to a bar with a Twitter employee and we agreed on a lot of things".
The same thing will happen to Bluesky. The system is akin to how CA and SSL does work with a critical difference. To get an SSL certificate, there is a clear step-by-step guide on how to get it. And after it has been granted it isn't revoked regardless of wether DigiCert agrees with the content of your website.
>When Elon took over; the rules were clearly laid out: buy your checkmark for $7/month (not sure of the price). Pay and you get it; stop paying and you loose it. Everybody knows exactly what it means.
except then he was also randomly giving out checkmarks to people who didn't want them and specifically told him to remove them
There is no such thing as unbiased reporting of facts. People not understanding that, and the fact that there is nothing inherently wrong with bias, is a big part of the problem.
You can be biased but adopt a systematic methodology and a deontology system, both of which help journalists mitigate their bias and produce quality reporting.
The big issue with the current news ecosystem and social media is their complete disregard for this methodology. By discarding the journalistic methodology, they make themselves propagandists, not journalists.
What if there is something inherently wrong with bias, but there is also no possibility to solve it. I see people operating under the idea that if there is something inherently wrong, then there must exist some solution to that inherent wrongness. What if the underlying issue is that there are flaws in humans that cannot be fixed and any attempt to manage is going to still leave some victims of the issue unprotected?
Telling your audience obviously false / anti-factual lies, without any regard for fact checking, is not just "biased reporting". And it is inherently wrong, malevolent, evil.
Anyway, I'm amazed each time I hear right wingers who did not get the joke seemingly complaining about how Reality has a left leaning political bias...
2. In my observation (not in the USA) in the last years (and also months/weeks) it has rather been a strong veering round back and forth of "globalism is good" vs "globalism is bad" with no clear observable direction at which side the pendulum will stop.
That all sounds fine except that the admin have no intention of keeping these tariffs, rendering your point kind of moot. Trump will enact/retract these tariffs multiple times over just the next month, and few to none of them will still be this high in three months. Since we are just speculating here - what is probably going on is that Trump has some very bad ideas and no one is allowed to contradict him. I'm sure there are people around him that know better, but he really is this simple minded. To your point about midterms, I'm sure his Project 2025 handlers are beside themselves that he's doing this, but there is little they can do to stop him.
That someone is not documented doesn’t mean you get to treat everyone that way. That someone is not documented doesn’t mean they have no rights for that matter.
The bigger comment is that these people are not documented or undocumented. To be either would require due process where such documents could be produced.
The label “undocumented” is utterly dishonest. “Undocumented” implies that something has been permitted, but not documented. Like agreeing to let a friend live in your basement apartment without drawing up a lease.
Illegal immigrants aren’t “undocumented.” They are present in America without the consent of the American people, as expressed in immigration law.
Does the law call someone who drives without a license an illegal driver or an unlicensed driver? Someone who practices medicine an illegal doctor or refer to them as unlicensed? Someone operating without a permit is not an illegal worker but an operator without a license.
You could certainly say they were driving, practicing medicine, or operating machinery illegally, or indeed working illegally if they don't provide valid documents.
Did you read my comment? They were driving illegally, not an illegal driver. Practicing medicine illegally, not an illegal doctor. Working illegally, not an illegal worker. See how the language of it works? They are in the US illegally, they are not an illegal person.
I don’t think these tendentious language games are winning as much support for your position as you think. Do you object to calling people felons, instead of saying they are people convicted of a felony? I know the idea is that by not calling someone a felon, you imply that some negative characteristic doesn’t define a person. But it’s been extended from diseases and mental illnesses, where the logic does make some sense, to legal categories, where I don’t think people ever had an issue keeping the two things apart. Also, progressives are hypocrites in that they are more than willing to call people racists instead of saying they’re merely people expressing racist thoughts or engaging in racist behaviors.
> Also, progressives are hypocrites in that they are more than willing to call people racists instead of saying they’re merely people expressing racist thoughts or engaging in racist behaviors.
FWIW that pattern of behavior has little to do with "being a progressive" and instead reflects the cultural norm. I'd even go so far as to posit that "progressives" are more likely to point out that, no, there's really not "a racist" but a person can hold a lot of extremely racist beliefs - the same way btw as there's really not "a progressive" but a person can hold a lot of progressive beliefs. A system can be "racist" in that it can be built on and to uphold racist attitudes or beliefs but a person can't be "racist" because racism isn't an intrinsic and immutable characteristic (neither is "progressive", "Catholic", "criminal" or "Republican", to name a few examples explicitly).
But precisely because you can't actually be "a progressive" but merely hold some progressive beliefs and opinions a lot of "progressives" uphold the same harmfully essentialist views as "non-progressives" who balk at being called out for racist opinions, views or actions by insisting "I'm not racist" regardless of whether the accusation is "you're a racist" or "you said/did something racist".
"Felon" is an obviously silly example as it's just a more specific form of "convict", i.e. someone convicted of a felony crime. It's often used in an essentialist way (but of course selectively so) but the more obvious example would be "criminal" because it is often used in a way that suggests an intrinsic essence of "criminality" even in the absence of sufficient evidence to make a legal case that would result in a conviction - or even the presence of an arguable crime at all. "Criminal" is thus distinct from "convict" in that a conviction is neither necessary nor sufficient for that label to be applied.
I don't give a crap about support of positions. A person can't be 'illegal'. They can be violating the law, but they are not illegal, unless we go back to Japanese internment camp style thinking, where the person themselves is the thing requiring incarceration.
Back when I was a libertarian they were pretty big on this argument, not progressives, as libertarians were the open borders people and progressives were off on some other cause.
The lack of enforcement of the law is also a kind of consent. The notion that a law as written alone represents 'people's consent' is a total non-starter in any kind of realistic system of governance, to build a claim of 'dishonesty' on top of that seems extra silly. You don't like the term, fine, you don't like the term. But let's not pretend that dislike is some kind of inevitable consequence compelled by Pure Logiks or whatever.
I don’t like it because it’s dishonest. The term “undocumented” implies that something has been agreed to or sanctioned, just not written down. But nobody agreed to allow illegal immigrants to come and stay here.
As you acknowledge, the term embeds within it the premise that “the lack of enforcement of the law is also a kind of consent.” That is, illegal immigrants have America’s consent to be present in the country, because the government doesn’t try to hard to deport them. You can make that argument, but almost nobody would agree with your premise. So the term is smuggling an implicit premise that almost nobody would agree with if the premise were stated clearly (as you have done here).
> But nobody agreed to allow illegal immigrants to come and stay here.
In 90% of cases somebody did. Somebody at the border talked to them. Somebody checked their passport or their documentation (at the border). So many "undocumented immigrants" are people who overstayed their visas, like Elon did.
They literally were documented but then they didn't keep up with the paperwork and thus became undocumented.
"Doccumented" status *is* literally just a case of keeping up with the paperwork.
Some people do sneak in but the *vast majority* come through legal ports of entry
Plenty of people agreed, especially the many, many businesses that happily employ them. Come back with this "consent of the people" stuff when we have mandatory E-Verify.
Does the court say that someone driving without a license is an 'illegal driver'? Nope, they say they are 'operating without a license' or 'driving illegally'. And guess what, that isn't because the courts are being dishonest.
You stop A from happening so B doesn't happen. You Stop B from happening so C doesn't happen, and so on. Sure, it may not lead to ethnic cleansing, and likely will not, but it only can when people are complacent. Picking people up off the street for doing nothing illegal and depriving them of due process is a huge fucking deal, I can't help that a majority of people in this country are ignorant as to why. Re: "I'm sure there are many cases with classified rationale", this is your tell. You are perfectly fine with this happening here and there, which is dangerous to the rest of us.
Not yet. Just advocating taking sovereign nations by force. Abducting without due process. Raw political retribution against enemies. So yeah let’s just sit back and chill and see what happens next maybe we’ll get lucky.
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