Six months have passed since X (formerly Twitter) started removing the legacy verified badges of notable individuals. Since then, only people who paid a certain amount of money to the platform were allowed in the verified club.
The paid verification came with its own set of perks, longer posts, the much anticipated ‘edit’ option, increased views per post and fewer advertisements. The pièce de résistance is these users with more than 15 million views and 500 followers are eligible for a payout by the social media platform. This may sound great for an average X user who could afford to pay $8 per month. But obviously, this came at a cost.
Fact-checkers’ headache
India has no dearth of disinformation. Unfortunately, this development has only made matters worse and life tougher for fact-checkers and journalists.
The reason is obvious. Some of the new members of the ‘blue tick club’, the X premium subscribers, have been at the forefront of some disinformation campaigns.
With increased views, owing to the premium subscription, they have also been getting a good reach. Case in point, during the 2023 Odisha train collision, there have been pieces of disinformation spread by X premium subscribers on how the incident was caused by the crowd in a mosque in the vicinity.
Though this was later debunked, one can’t be entirely sure if everyone knows that the claim is false.
A few major State elections and the 2024 general elections are around the corner. In a situation like this, there is a high chance that fringe groups and trolls may weaponise the blue tick to spread wrong information purposely to cause harm, change narratives and worse, make money out of it. This isn’t an imaginary scenario but something that can happen in the near future.
Now, the onus is on the government and X to filter out who actually gets to keep a blue tick and to penalise the ones who spread harmful and wrong information.