The social media site claims that dead celebs are following Blue
A comment on King’s checkmark: ‘I’m sorry to hear about Khashoggi forking over $8 a month on Twitter’
Michael Jackson, Chadwick Boseman, Kobe Bryant, Barbara Walters, Anthony Bourdain, and Paul Walker are just a few of the many deceased stars to have regained their verification status. The platform is even claiming that prominent journalist and columnist Jamal Khashoggi is forking over $8 a month despite having been murdered in 2018.
This is all consistent with the nonstop forum drama that is Elon Musk’s Twitter, but there’s one detail that’s particularly rankled King and others. These people aren’t being made clear they are paying for the service. If you hover over King’s checkmark, you’ll get this:
How weird is Twitter? Is Steven J. Musk a winning business strategy? The case for legal advice on social media, by M. Roberts
Look, you shouldn’t take legal advice from social media. People love throwing around strange interpretations of real laws. (Case in point: legal blogger Ken White’s perpetual nemesis RICO.) There’s a serious, well-reasoned discussion of how weird this situation is. The best I’ve seen is a long thread from Alexandra Roberts, a Northeastern University School of Law professor that we’ve cited at The Verge before.
Roberts makes clear there’s no slam dunk case against Twitter. There are many state and federal rules that you could argue about applying in a variety of ways, including the Lanham Act. Colorado, for instance, bans falsely representing “sponsorship, approval, status, affiliation, or connection” for a product. Is suggesting that Stephen King paid for Twitter Blue a sign that King approves of Twitter Blue? Roberts said the argument sounded like a reasonable one. Solicitor Simon McGarr makes some similar points in an article about how European false endorsement laws might apply.
And the entire dust-up hinges on some language that Twitter could easily change. Until last week, the checkmark label made clear that someone either had a certain level of notability or subscribed to Twitter Blue. That still appears to be how the system works, and reverting it would seem to address the underlying false endorsement claims pretty neatly.
Over the course of a single weekend, it was discovered that the most popular status symbol on the micro-Blogging platform had been turned into something that caused users to wonder if it was illegal. I can’t deny Musk’s talent for laying new and exciting legal minefields but I don’t think he’s a winning business strategy.
