Twitter’s blue checkmarks are a total scam, says EU investigation

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When Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44B, he made a series of changes that saw advertisers pause or greatly reduce their spending on the platform.

One big change was that Twitter verification would be available for sale as part of a Twitter Blue subscription.

Musk was forced to rethink the move after it created an open season for trolls, pranksters, and scammers. At one point, Musk and the company even blocked new accounts from purchasing Twitter Blue subscriptions; that’s how bad it got.

Eventually, it was later relaunched and back to business as usual.

For a while, actual verified Twitter accounts retained their blue checkmarks, but those were removed last year—at which point having one became a badge of shame (rightfully so), as it showed you’d paid for it.

The most enthusiastic customers were cryptocurrency scammers who took advantage of the boosted visibility of paid accounts to commit their frauds.

The EU’s Digital Services Act places a number of obligations on social media companies, one of which is to take steps to avoid users being deceived by fake content. The Financial Times reports that selling X verification breaches the DSA.

In preliminary findings from an investigation that began last year, the EU said a decision following Musk’s $44bn takeover of the company two years ago to allow anyone to pay to gain a blue checkmark would deceive millions of users.

“Since anyone can subscribe to obtain such a ‘verified’ status, it negatively affects users’ ability to make free and informed decisions about the authenticity of the accounts and the content they interact with,” said regulators in Brussels.

The commission’s preliminary findings state that the design and functioning of X’s blue checkmark feature is an illegal verification tool.

Naturally, Elon Musk disagrees with the agency’s decision and even claims they offered him a secret deal that would have prevented the company from facing any fines, just as long as Twitter censored speech on the platform.

Naturally, Musk didn’t provide any evidence to back up this claim, so it could very well be a false or misguided statement. Again, without evidence to back this up, we can’t say for sure if any of this is true or not.

In the meantime, X can appeal the DSA finding. If the appeal fails, X can be fined up to 6% of its annual global turnover, which would be very hard for X to pay since its revenue figures aren’t anything to write home about.

The commission is still investigating whether X has breached the DSA by failing to tackle illegal content and disinformation on the platform.

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Editors’ Recommendations:

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• Marc Cuban slams Twitter as Elon Musk’s echo chamber
• Elon Musk’s rebranded Twitter, X, sees a major drop in value

Kevin Raposo

Kevin is KnowTechie's founder and executive editor. With over 15 years of blogging experience in the tech industry, Kevin has transformed what was once a passion project into a full-blown tech news publication. Shoot him an email at kevin@knowtechie.com or find him on Mastodon or Post.