Isn’t that a good thing that you have already created a mental filter about people who pay for it as being of a “certain type” .. the problem with ticks being bestowed upon some journalists is that they become the brokers/influencers by the virtue of simply working for a newspaper .. that power is vaporised now .. tbh the real question is why didn’t twitter pre musk implement community notes .. I mean it’s not such a bleeding edge / hard to execute idea ..

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kej 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

>tbh the real question is why didn’t twitter pre musk implement community notes

They did. Community notes are just the rebranded "Birdwatch" program that predates Musk.

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TheAceOfHearts 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Community Notes was literally built by pre-Elon Twitter: Birdwatch was first announced on August 2020, and it was initially launched on January 2021. On November 2022, Elon rebranded it to Community Notes and made it widely available.

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mac-attack 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In the same way that someone speaking on behalf of the White House is held to a standard whenever they speak, the same applies to journalists that are representing a newspaper.

Making everyone 'equal' is a political heuristic that IMO presupposes that journalists can't be trusted and are as useful as a random person paying $20/mo.

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thevillagechief 3 days ago | parent [-]

I'm going to go ahead and say that the last 5 years did in fact show that journalists cannot be trusted. I will agree that random persons paying $20 obliterates what was already an embarrassingly low bar. Really, opening it up just expanded the pool of what was already just influencers/activists. And why did celebrities have the bluecheck? It's probably more useful as a verification mechanism.

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VoidWhisperer 3 days ago | parent [-]

Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding, but wasnt that the original purpose of the blue checkmark - a verification that the twitter account was who they are saying they are, be it a person, company, etc?

	▲	thevillagechief a day ago \| parent [-]
		It was a status symbol pretending to be a verification. There was a reason the people were referred to as "blue checks". And it could be taken away if you fell afoul of the prevailing norms at the time.

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lawlessone 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

>that power is vaporised now

and replaced with something worse.