Twitter's blue tick rule changes may lower the sueball barrier Infamous online cesspit Twitter may have unintentionally made itself easier to sue for the things users write on its site, following recently announced changes to its "blue tick" verification system. Earlier this month Twitter staff used the service's Twitter Support account to declare that its controversial blue tick will now …
If I buy a megaphone and mouth off highly objectionable speech at Speakers Corner, can the megaphone manufacturer be sued? Didn't think so.
The blue tick was always about establishing the authenticity of the speaker, not a validation of what they say. Where a "celebrity" speaks, we should always be able to validate the real from the fake and the satire.
Twitter undertook some due diligence to ensure @realDonaldTrump was the real Donald Trump. We should always have the ability to identify his bile as genuine, removing the blue tick because Twitter doesn't agree with what he has said is a bad thing. Sad.
They undertook some due diligence to ensure that @TRobinsonNewEra was the real Tommy Robinson, to the extent that he can be described as real, he seems to have a lot of different names.
They have now withdrawn his blue tick due to him being an objectionable white supremacist Nazi, whereas Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) still has his blue tick.
So presumably they have a set of criteria in place that says that Paul Joseph Watson is fine, but Tommy Robinson is not, and therefore they are endorsing Paul Joseph Watson.
@DontFeedTheTrolls; "The blue tick was always about establishing the authenticity of the speaker, not a validation of what they say."
Indeed, this *was* the case.
Emphasis on "was"... because as soon as they started withdrawing it from people they disapproved of, it ceased to be a neutral identifier and effectively became an implicit endorsement. This was the whole *point* of the article!
As for the megaphone, I'm not sure that it's analogous enough in a general- let alone legal- sense to bear any comparison with Twitter's situation.
Pretty sure if you hovered over the tick or somewhere near the tick it clearly said "verified account" which to anyone with a brain cell indicated they have verified the person is who they say they are.
Effectively they have changed what the blue ticks are for, all for no good reason.
Had an inkling in the past when they refused to give certain people a blue tick that it was because they wanted to punish them for their political views or similar. Twitter have always seen the tick as giving someone more legitimacy and maybe more followers and traffic as a result so have used it as a carrot and a stick. Maybe this change is not so much of a surprise considering.
Twitter is definitely not a tool of free speech.
I wasn't aware that the blue tick had this other meaning, at least to some (many?) users. What even makes people think this kind of nonsense?
But if Twitter want to be sure that people understand what it means, why not just change it to text that says "verified account" (in the local language) rather than use a tick, which clearly has been misinterpreted.
The first well-publicized case of a blue checkmark being withdrawn in response to offensive comments made was in January of 2016, when Milo Yiannopoulos posted a tweet that violated Twitter's TOS. And while he was eventually banned from the service entirely, the revocation of his checkmark was puzzling. Why de-verify the authenticity of someone in response to offensive comments? How can someone's speech, however vile, make them less authentic?
Like most everything that comes out of Dorsey's cash incinerator, the concept seems poorly considered and even more poorly implemented.
I've noticed that some who've lost the blue tick have taken to putting a blue circle/diamond character in their display name.
Now obviously this is just making full use of the wide character and formatting options available and not an attempt at making it look like they have the tick.
And in no way should it be assumed the people (such as Julian Assange no names no pack drill) doing this are trying it on.
Certifying an account belongs to a prominent person is was and I doubt there will be much debate about this. Also, certification does not imply agreement. Thus, what bile is spewed on the account is the sole responsibility of the spewer.
Using it grant editorial approval is much riskier as Twitter is taking an editorial position. I doubt they are doing much 'due diligence' to verify the accuracy of each tweet. If some approved bile-spewer says something extremely obnoxious they have possibly created a legal liability because of the implied editorial control and the definite editorial approval. This system might work under US law but I doubt it will work other countries as each country has somewhat different laws on editorial responsibility and defamation.
But look at the bright side, a few Hulk Hogan lawsuits later lost and we maybe rid of Twitter forever if they persist in this.
A more sensible policy, surely, would be to say that anyone who can prove that they are sufficiently fame-worthy, or that they have been impersonated on the site before, is eligible for the blue tick. And that the withdrawal of the same comes after, say, x number of upheld complaints in a certain time frame (say ten in six months), and that would merit a one-year ban from the tick and then a second strike would be permanent.
So users of the "infamous online cesspit" were, to the great astonishment of absolutely no one, so stupid that they misinterpreted the blue tick of "confirmed identity" as "we like this 140 characters of superficial tripe".
They continued with this erroneous and simple-minded misconception despite being repeatedly told "No, no, no, it ain't so".
Their stubborn brainlessness eventually led the cesspit to say "Hey, you idiots were right all along".
Was it beyond the imagination of said cesspit's managers to dream up a different way of indicating verified identify—something incredibly difficult to come up with, like, say, a little icon saying "ID'd"—and, if they felt the need to stick their necks out, re-purpose a more obvious "Like/Don't Like" icon for approval?
Yeah, I'm being a wee tad sarcastic but really—this level of dumbness over a frakking little *tick*??
We *knew* Twatterers were mostly egotistical time-wasting morons, and we knew that even before the Cretin-in-Chief started manuring the world with his "thoughts", but until now it wasn't quite so obvious that the company's management fell into the same category ...
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