According to Andy Cohn, who attempted to get the Twitter account for The Fader verified in 2012, only accounts who faced repeated impersonation attempts or those who spent at least US$15,000 on advertisements in the last three months were eligible for verification an impersonator of Wendi Deng Murdoch-then businessman Rupert Murdoch's wife-was able to get verified regardless. In 2010, Twitter opened up verification to all users, but shut down public verification after it became inundated with requests. Within days, notable individuals such as actor Ashton Kutcher and talk show host Oprah Winfrey received a blue checkmark. The blog post provides an image of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)'s emergency account with a verification checkmark beside its name while naming other institutions and people that could receive the checkmark, such as well-known artists and athletes. In a blog post titled, "Not Playing Ball", then-CEO Biz Stone wrote that Twitter " an opportunity to improve user experience". In response, Twitter introduced a verification system known as "Verified Accounts", and settled the lawsuit with La Russa. The lawsuit included the feed of a Twitter account not owned by La Russa, with the first tweet in the feed referencing the deaths of Cardinals pitchers Darryl Kile and Josh Hancock. Louis Cardinals, Tony La Russa, sued Twitter after an account on the service began impersonating him, alleging that Twitter abetted in defaming his likeness. X marks the spot.In May 2009, then-manager of the St. This, too, felt like intentional vandalism: The old Twitter has been vanquished, it seemed to say. And so on Sunday night, before the crane arrived, the company projected its new logo - an apparently off-the-shelf Unicode character - onto the side of the building it currently occupies. Viewed through this lens, it’s only natural that Musk would conclude his project by destroying the one aspect of the old Twitter that still remained: its name. But at its core, Musk’s misadventure at Twitter has been reactionary: an ideological purge of the employees he saw as “woke” and entitled a gleeful inversion of industry standards around content moderation a hollowing out of the free product and a redistribution of the company’s attention and wealth toward right-wing users. Yes, Musk regularly issues grandiose pronouncements about how Twitter will someday become a WeChat-style “super app,” ensure the future of civilization, and so on. Just as he graffitis his 420s and 69s all over corporate filings and just as he paints over corporate signage and office rooms with his little sex puns so does he delight in erasing the Twitter that was.Īll of this has been clear since at least November, when Musk gleefully mocked a stack of Black Lives Matter T-shirts that he found in a company closet. Here’s my answer: this framing misses the true shape of Musk’s project, which is best understood not as a money-making endeavor, but as an extended act of cultural vandalism. Surely he could have built that for less than $44 billion? Mark Zuckerberg did! I guess my question is, what was he paying for? Musk didn’t want Twitter for its employees (whom he fired) or its code (which he trashes regularly) or its brand (which he abandoned) or its most dedicated users (whom he is working to drive away) he just wanted an entirely different Twitter-like service. “Why rebrand Twitter? It's an incredibly strong brand - even among those who do not use it,” journalist Tom Harwood noted, accurately.īloomberg’s Matt Levine had a similar curiosity : Nine months into Musk’s takeover of the platform, some observers still strive to understand it as a business transaction. In April, after the company’s landlord reportedly prevented it from changing the sign, Musk painted over its “W.” To countless passersby on Market Street, it has been Titter ever since. (“Through their investigation officers were able to determine that no crime was committed, and this incident was not a police matter,” a spokeswoman told me.)Įven those who still remain nostalgic for Twitter 1.0 had reason to be heartened by the demolition. The San Francisco Police Department briefly intervened to stop the work in progress, but eventually relented. The crane partially blocked the street, confusing passing robo-taxis. In keeping with Musk’s characteristic indifference to authority, none of this had been cleared beforehand with the city. The plan was to remove the sign from the historic building’s facade, putting a symbolic end to the company that owner Elon Musk had over the weekend re-branded to X. On Monday afternoon, a crane rolled up to Twitter’s headquarters on Market Street.
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