It’s clear to me that Musk purchased twitter in order to destroy it. The blue checkmark is a verification mark for authenticity. This is particularly important in terms of identifying sources. To make it pay-to-play is to burn twitter's reliability as a news source, and it's reliability in general, to the ground.

Then again such social media companies are not, and have never been, a “public forum”. They are privately owned networks that have a single priority: harvesting profits. Primarily from selling their users’ information to those who which to target them. Everything else is secondary. They have shown that they cannot be trusted in any meaningful sense. We deserve much better.

Remember Google Fusion Tables? I spent many months building digital humanities resources around it. One was a WW1 map that identified the final resting place of the over 1,000 people from Limerick who lost their lives in that conflict. The other was a resource that mapped the sites of Collective Punishment of African American communities in the U.S. Many other historians built fantastic resources using it as a way to visually and spatially educate about the past. It was accessible and effective.

Then in 2019 Google erased this product. Just gone forever. I realised then that these companies are the antithesis of libraries, cultural institutions and the open source movement. They see culture, and our free labour in using their (temporary) tools, as instantly and permanently disposable ephemera to attract attention for the purpose of advertising. All that power and wealth put to use to fulfil such an empty mission.

Some further thoughts on my Mastodon experience: it has made me step back and reevaluate how social media should operate. We built entire communities on Twitter but were ultimately treated like a product for trade. It does not have to be like this.