The most shocking thing about Twitter Blue is just how uniform the vibe and interests of its users are. The genres of media on apps like YouTube and Netflix are broad enough that there’s no one person who’d watch them or want to remove the ads from them. These platforms aim to capture as wide an audience as possible, so they don’t serve only one crowd. Reflecting Twitter’s shrinking mainstream relevance, nine out of ten Twitter Blue loyalists are some manner of meme conservative, Roman statues guy, tech grifter, or tech griftee. So, how did we get here?
The answer goes back to what the blue check can simultaneously offer the richest man in the world and the guys who think they’ll break out of their hometown investing in something called PhrenologyCoin. The barons of Silicon Valley have entire armies of labour to boss around, the money to buy any product or service imaginable, and evidently, carte blanche to rearrange our societies with the delicacy of a kid shaking an Etch-a-Sketch. They have become accustomed to a firehose of constant aggrandisement, but the one type of social status they’ve never been able to buy is the love of the public.
There’s a background glow of prestige and intelligence that has long followed these guys around, and there’s a cult of personality for each, even Elon Musk, a man devoid of personality. But cult is the opposite of mainstream. When Zuckerberg was called up in front of Congress, the public relished his debasement, and the biopic of him well-received by cinemagoers does not paint him as an emotionally intelligent and generous man. One of the best-received TV shows of last year was about a delusional startup founder who was able to amass billions based on a categorically fraudulent health business. And as hard as Amazon and Tesla crank the consent manufacturing machine, the press on them remains condemnatory. Having black employees being referred to as “slaves” (allegedly) or forcing drivers to pee in bottles isn’t enough to stop customers from buying your product, but it doesn’t win hearts and minds either.
For Elon Musk, the ambient disdain for him and his class is like sandpaper on his skin. I’ve seen onlookers baffled that anyone insulated by billions would care about a rando posting “Peelon Musk” on the internet. But we all know on some level that money and power aren’t replacements for being loved or feeling fulfilled. Again, they make a lot of art about this. Charles Foster Kane pined for the simple comfort of his childhood, even as he stood astride America’s political apparatus. No amount of indulgent cavorting can stop Jay Gatsby’s longing for the woman he can’t have. Similarly, all the Ethereum in the world can’t hold at bay Elon Musk’s humble aching for the mockery to cease and the critics to fall silent. All that would be left in its place is a user called something like WesternBrilliance1488 to tell him, “Epic Wojak, sir”. Musk is so desperate to control the conversation about him that he bought the premiere public discourse website. But, he discovered, like everyone else who’s touched Twitter, that this object is cursed.
The public disapproval that rules Musk’s brain has also been a traditional bugbear of the right. When you’re mounting an offence on everyone who’s not a white, able, cis-hetero man, you tend to make a lot of enemies. When you start yelling on the TV that people deserve harsher economic conditions and that we need to wage violence against minorities even harder, most people either don’t care or think you’re kind of an asshole. Fascists and conservatives often end up without vocal majority support for their policies, which is a problem for them because, in an ostensibly democratic society, you need to create the impression there is public approval of your position. So, they find exculpatory explanations for why explicit bigotry isn’t more popular or just fake that it is.
They posit that there’s a “silent majority” that believes all the things they say but is being censored or isn’t brave enough to voice the most protected opinions on the planet. They throw out that their political opponents are just “virtue signalling”, implying that their arguments are in bad faith and can be safely discarded. They say that Hollywood, that is, the institution where women’s autonomy is consistently violated and heroes are often indiscriminately violent, is actually a liberal propaganda factory. They brand protestors against their position as being out-of-towners strategically deployed against local values. Or they declare that there is an outright conspiracy against them.
This is not to say that the more demure members of privileged groups don’t harbour the same biases or even the same views as the mask-off tyrants. It’s certainly not to say that the average privileged person will actively resist right-wing politics, either. But many talking heads do hold some ideas to the right of the Overton window. What’s more, the beneficiaries of the current power balance may object to these guys’ tone or overtness, even if they don’t have a fundamental problem with the message.
For example, many white people, if asked, would say that “western traditionalists” are wrong to believe we should reimpose segregation. However, those moderates aren’t that likely to go out of their way to secure freedoms for non-white people or analyse where their views and actions contradict that purported support for racial equality. A lot of men won’t pin their flag to the mast of besuited dorks at podiums saying we have to get women back in the kitchen, but that also doesn’t mean that they’re going to reassess the division of labour in their household, and they may consider supporting a feminist organisation to be a bridge too far. Passively profiting from your privilege, rather than challenging it, or ruffling feathers with openly fascist rhetoric, is the path of least resistance.
Right-wing demogogues, however, are desperate to see complete deference to the perspective of the privileged and to present themselves as the underdogs who deserve more time at the mic. So, they brand anything less than total adherence to fascist politics not as the path of least resistance in line with an anti-women and anti-minority status quo, but as anti-conservative persecution. And they may even believe it.
Apply these ideas to Twitter, and you get the positions of Musk and many clowns of his political stripe, whose persecution complex manifested as a paranoid obsession with blue checks and bots. It’s not that it’s the norm for people to think you’re kind of a dick if you side with the “Mexicans are rapists” guy or fire the employees who walk past your desk at the wrong time (allegedly). Instead, they attribute that negative sentiment to the “liberal” media and a few rhetorically invalid, possibly foreign actors, who have managed to exert an outsized influence on the discourse. The liberal media, in this case, is represented by the verified users, and the outsiders are the bots.
During the Trump era, in particular, you saw a lot of public news organisations and celebrities denouncing the former President, backing BLM, or repeating various unflattering facts about Republicans. This basic reporting of facts and low-bar progressivism earned these accounts and publications the seething resentment of the right. And the alt-right has gotten quite skilled at scooping up alienated young men who haven’t seen their desired level of recognition in their personal lives. Embittered by their life experience but emboldened by traditional masculinity, these boys begrudge the people who do find an audience, and under the right community leader, that malice can be laundered into political capital. Alt-right thought leaders are able to control the worldview of their audience tightly, in part, because the bigoted views of their audience have alienated them from regular people, leaving them with only white supremacist YouTubers as the ones they believe understand them. Down on their luck, they’re desperate for a surrogate father to tell them their views are justified and that those fathers will hijack society from their political enemies.
Now, we’re going to come back to that right-wing powder keg in a minute, but to get to the end of this story, we need to shift gears and talk about the blue check as a symbol. Twitter’s verification badge is inherently tied to the perception of authenticity, and the concepts of authenticity and social status are inextricably connected. We respect “real ones” and hate “fake people”. Original goods like artworks and bags are valued higher than replicas, even if they’re indistinguishable. Brands will market themselves as “the original”, and we will “accept no substitutes”. For Twitter, authentication was the only thing that kept it in good reputational and legal standing.
In 2009, three years after its launch, the platform attracted complaints from celebrities battling impersonating accounts, with MLB star Tony La Russa suing the site over a fake cyber-La Russa soiling his public image. So, Twitter set up a scheme. Anyone with enough cultural cache to be worth impersonating and enough money to send lawyers to Twitter’s door would be given a verification mark so you could tell the real among the fakes. As those badges were only pinned on people with high cultural and economic value, the blue check became a symbol of prestige. At least, for the kind of person who wishes they were an influencer.
Enter Elon Musk. Like all billionaires, Musk must side with the right out of financial pragmatism. His seat atop a big pile of gold and right to boss employees around are predicted on a political system that refuses to redistribute wealth away from the exploitative actors. But jealousy and quasi-fascism are more than a means to an end for Musk; they’re personal passions. In 2018, Musk came up with a plan to rescue trapped children from a cave in Chiang Rai, Thailand. When a diver set out a competing and superior plan to save those kids, Musk felt so threatened that he publicly accused the man of being a paedophile. He was overthrown as CEO of the original X.com, and 23 years later, he is still trying to turn the app he does have into that website. He flirts with D-list Nazi adjacents who have nothing to offer him except ego-stroking. He made fun of a disabled employee because he felt embarrassed after that worker called attention to the fact that Twitter’s HR department had gone missing in action.
Despite Elon being a multi-billionaire in his 50s, the far-right was able to court him for the same reasons it’s been able to ensnare so many frustrated twenty-somethings: a crippling insecurity coupled with a belief that he deserves to be the centre of the universe. It’s why you see Musk sucking up to peons several rungs down the totem pole like Ian Miles Cheong or Doge Designer. Politically and economically, Musk outranks these people millions of times over. Still, emotionally, he’s slavishly reliant on their eagerness to reinforce his perception of himself. It’s a perception of a morally pure genius who will rightfully decide the direction of our species. And his reliance is growing every day because the more he tweets and the more he mangles Twitter, the more he chips away at that public image of himself as a new Turing and establishes an image of someone prickly and ignorant. He needs ever-larger tubs of ointment to salve the increasing backlash resulting from his policy and pollitics. He is both right-wing authority and subject in this relationship.
When you’re desperate for validation, you become increasingly petty, needing to blow up even the tiniest victory to the size of a planet for a big enough hit of acknowledgement. With Musk’s pettiness increasingly on display, he has become a kind of Patron Saint of Losers. If you are someone with no discernible intelligence who wishes to be recognised as a genius, if you are outraged that the TV sometimes focuses on people of a different race or gender from you, or if you’ve alienated people with your toxic social views, here’s Elon Musk, a man doing exactly the same, but from a throne. And you can join him on his quest for just $8 a month. But wait, there’s more, because this is where our earlier observations about the enemies of the right and the meaning of the blue check come in.
Musk has bought the public square from the “leftist establishment”. That is, the guys who understood it’s not great business to let Neo-Nazis run roughshod over the timeline. Musk vows to destroy all the “bots” saying nasty things about conservatives and has stripped the symbol of social status from the liberal media and celebrities, delivering it to you, the dipshit. You may not be able to express your hateful or half-baked ramblings to the people surrounding you in real-life, but Musk’s Twitter will prioritise your post in search results and comments sections. Now, they’ll have to listen to you! It’s everything every other far-right computer daddy has promised. These people are desperate for validation, and what does the verification mark do but validate?
If you’re not one of these balls of hate adrift in life, you may be someone who recognises the overconfidence and naivety of these users and see marks for your scam. That’s another reason to buy Twitter Blue; you can earn their trust. If you’re wearing the blue badge, you’re advertising that you probably believe paying for a free website will earn you respect or that Elon Musk is capable of running a business responsibly. If you’ll believe that, then there are plenty of guys who’ve got a bridge, an ape NFT, or some raw organs to sell you.
Because, of course, Twitter Blue itself is a scam. Not in that it won’t block some ads or prioritise your post, but in that, it isn’t going to siphon respect from media figures to a disaffected right wing. If you take the blue check away from people and organisations with fame and prestige, it’s no longer associated with fame and prestige. And if you reassign the blue check to grifters and assholes, it’s now associated with grifters and assholes. But then, if you are a grifter or an asshole, maybe that’s exactly the membership card you want. Thanks for reading.
