Twitter's Blue Lawlessness
Trust: The most salient point that Yuval Noah Harari made in "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" is that trust is the glue that holds societies together and enables large-scale cooperation among individuals who might otherwise be strangers to one another.
Trust is based on order. Harari developed the idea that "imagined orders," such as laws, religions, and ideologies, enable human societies to function by providing a common set of beliefs and values that generate trust and cooperation among people.
Break the rules, and trust disappears.
The new Twitter promised a rules-based social media platform. No more shadow bans. People would trust the rules.
What followed was nothing of the sort.
Twitter Blue was supposed to be the start of building a thriving platform. However, recent developments after 4/20 show that Twitter is anything but a rules-based platform.
First, there was this rule: celebrities, all those people who were given the coveted Twitter Blue mark, would not retain that check unless they paid. Shortly after, as celebrities with 100k+ to 1m+ followers passed the deadline without paying, their Twitter Blue marks were removed, leaving them annoyed at the preposterous proposition.
I admit that soon after Elon Musk's takeover, I thought that everyone paying for the verification mark made sense as a goodwill act to help clean up the bots. But I reconsidered that position. Why would Twitter punish its most influential account members when they make Twitter a living platform? People want to hear what they are saying. They are ideas market makers.
Now Twitter is giving them the verification mark. The rule has been broken.
Then there is the "Block Twitter Blue accounts" movement. It is an annoyance for Twitter as it discourages the rank-and-file people from paying the $8 if they ever considered doing so. Now Twitter is giving them Twitter Blue to counter the movement. Rule broken again.
Add to this the "Funded by the government" label. That was supposed to be the rule: if a media outlet gets even 1% of its revenue from the government, they get the label. NPR and CBC quit Twitter, and their move was ridiculed by Elon. Then someone noticed that Russian media outlets don't have the label. Broken rule again.
Now the label has been quietly removed. No rule.
For Substack writers, Twitter has been a terrible host. First, tweets containing links to Substack were shadowbanned: they were unlikable and un-retweetable. No explanation. No rule. I wished the Substack founders have done more to raise the awareness of this issue.
Now, in a goodwill gesture, unexplained and with no rule basis, as a Substack author, you can post links to Substack posts, but the link has no media attached, nor text, which is the usual template for posting on Twitter. Even the much-hated New York Times (hated by Twitter) gets the full tweet makeup service. Why are Substack authors downgraded? What rule?
These events point to one conclusion: there is no rule of law at Twitter. Twitter is lawless.
Until Twitter rebuilds its image of law and order, it cannot be trusted. This platform cannot thrive.