Elon Musk struck a deeply wounding blow to the egos of corporate journalists, “activists” and others with legacy blue check accounts on Twitter this Friday, calling them “deeply corrupt’ and promising their verification will be “removed soon.”
On Thursday, a legacy verified account complained, “Dear @elonmusk the blue verification mark is now become a joke. Earlier the blue tick verification was only given to ppl who were public figures and political figures but sadly today any Tom Dick n Harry gets verified. Ur verification tick has lost the charm..”
Musk shot back with the reply, “Legacy blue checks will be removed soon. Those are the ones that are truly corrupt.”
In November 2022, Musk stated, “Far too many corrupt legacy Blue ‘verification’ checkmarks exist, so no choice but to remove legacy Blue in coming months.”
In December, Musk further clarified “In a few months, we will remove all legacy blue checks. The way in which they were given out was corrupt and nonsensical.”
Most recently, Musk noted that “Twitter’s legacy Blue Verified is unfortunately deeply corrupted, so will sunset in a few months.”
Musk has said that the code for Twitter is like a “fractal Rube Goldberg machine,” and that it may have to be completely rebuilt from the ground up to fix it.
Commentator Dave Rubin shared a thread on Twitter on Thursday, after spending two days at their San Francisco headquarters with Elon Musk and the Twitter team, who are working to fix the Big Tech platform.
Rubin revealed that Musk sees the code for Twitter as a “fractal Rube Goldberg machine,” in that every time they try and fix the code from the previous administration, more problems arise. “A delicate balance he likened to a Jenga tower,” Rubin said. “One wrong move the whole thing collapses.”
Twitter engineers are working on the code “trying to untie the crazy knot,” but still don’t know why “things got so much better once Elon made the acquisition and why it seems far worse now,” with some big accounts being “absolutely crushed” by the algorithm. Rubin said that while the team “still have more questions than answers… they did learn a bunch of stuff.”
This news and commentary by Gabriel Keane originally appeared on Valiant News.
