People on the social network say they don’t pay for their blue checks, but they still have them

Twitter’s doge: Why does the New York Times not have a blue check? A protest against the Trump-Morton policy on Twitter

The owner of the company has argued that the company doesn’t give preferential treatment, but experts say relaxed verification standards may make it easier to spread misinformation.

The New York Times other accounts, such as its arts, travel and books, remained verified even though the main account lost its blue check. It is unclear why the New York Times doesn’t have a gold “organizations” check mark, like accounts for other news outlets. The New York Times did not plan to pay for verification after its blue check was removed.

Musk said that he will take the meme off, after an account that often engages with Musk posted a meme this weekend about the Times not paying for verification. The billionaire lashed out at the Times, saying his coverage is boring and propaganda.

The weekend moves are just the latest example of Twitter creating confusion and whiplash for users over feature changes — and in this case, not just any users, but many of the most high-profile accounts that have long been a key selling point for the platform. Musk often leads decisions about the platform according to his own preferences rather than by policy.

In a separate puzzling move, Twitter’s blue bird logo at the top of the site was replaced on Monday with doge, the meme representing the cryptocurrency dogecoin, which Musk has promoted. Dogecoin shot up 20% on Monday.

In early November, Twitter launched the option for people paying for its Twitter Blue subscription service to receive blue checks. The program was quickly put on pause after being plagued by a wave of celebrity and corporate impersonators, and was relaunched in December.

In the days leading up to the blue check purge that wasn’t, prominent users such as actor William Shatner and anti-bullying activist Monica Lewinksy pushed back against the idea that, as power users that draw attention to the site, they should have to pay for a feature that keeps them safe from impersonation.

The new label could make it easier for people to scam high-profile users by muddying the reason accounts are verified. According to experts in inauthentic behavior, it is not clear that using reserved verification for paid users will reduce the number of bots on the site.

He said there should be a different standard for celebrities. The paid feature could also drive revenue, which could help Musk, who is on the hook for significant debt after buying Twitter for $44 billion.

Musk last week also said that starting on April 15, only verified accounts would be recommended in users’ “For You” feeds alongside the accounts they follow.

Twitter had previously given the badges to celebrities, politicians and other notable organizations or people for free as a way to distinguish their accounts from those who sought to imitate them and to show their identities had been confirmed. Celebrity and politicians could post freely without fear of being impersonated, thanks to the help of public figures on the service.

According to documents, Musk tried to get in touch with the FTC, but they turned him down because of the inquiry into privacy and data practices.

Musk already biffed it with advertisers: revenue has fallen by half since October, Bloomberg reports. Historically, ads were the main source of revenue — 89 percent of it in Twitter’s last full year as a public company. It’s necessary that the social network needs to make money. The company is under a lot of pressure to make money with their paid subscription service. What is it that you get with $8 a month? Oh, a blue checkmark.

A professor at the New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics told NPR that users with ulterior motives could exploit the paid service to gain a bigger following and drown out better information.

A user with a blue check pretended to be Eli Lilly and posted on the internet that the firm was offering free conjugates. Lilly’s stock price fell temporarily after the company denied and apologized for a fake tweeter that received hundreds ofreposted and thousands of likes.

For those who may be unfamiliar, that checkmark was originally used as a way of verifying users. The idea for creating it was influenced by the proliferation of hoaxes during Hurricane Sandy as well as the fact that fake news was very common on social media in the early days.

This matters because reporters live-tweet breaking news. You just had to follow my account and I would be posting my impressions in real time before I wrote my review. The blue checkmark next to my name gave readers some measure of confidence I wasn’t the kind of person that might blithely make stuff up.

The idea of a checkmark as a status symbol was seized on by Musk. He was willing to offer it for sale. By charging for it, he devalued it. The first time this happened, it didn’t go that well: impersonation, the exact thing the checkmark was meant to prevent, ran rampant. But there was another problem. The checkmark was marked lower in status than the legacy checks because of who paid to get it.

Trying to be cool is not cool, and paying to be cool is for suckers. Musk has said that the For You page would be for paid users only, meaning that it would be full of marketers, newsletter writers and other content shills, which will ruin the feed. That is assuming it happens. This is an Elon Musk company; he might change his mind.

In a world where there is a sense in the product, Musk would have to return it to its original form. If paid for, it would make sense for me to purchase it because it would provide a better user experience like the priority service on harassment or hacking. But as a status symbol? Girl, please.

Musk’s reputation — his cool factor, if you will — was part of what sold Teslas. Except now we’re all watching him publicly flail with an also-ran social network. It’s increasingly obvious that Musk’s less a real-life Tony Stark and more of a cranky Boomer who spends too much time looking at memes while his businesses are on fire. It has implications for his other companies as well. The last twelve months have seen a steep decline in the price of shares of the company.

But maybe Musk’s mistake is understandable — after all, part of his reputation as a genius came from his successful businesses. For him, money did buy cool. That’s part of what makes the Twitter mess so funny. Being exposed as bad is a business problem. Not so great a genius? That’s the kind of reputational damage Musk can’t buy his way out of.