Not all of the new blue checks on Twitter are fans of Elon Musk.
As Twitter’s iconic blue check goes from being a badge of legitimacy to a sign that you pay the company $8 a month, some high-profile users have campaigned for #BlockTheBlue. In other words, they want to block all users from subscribing to Twitter Blue by using plugins and automated scripts.
The thinking behind the move is that if someone is voluntarily giving Twitter a monthly payment for a blue check, they’re probably aligning with the so-called “anti-wake” politics that Musk and his confidantes routinely advocate. The instructor of the Harvard Cyberlaw Clinic, Alejandra Caraballo, published a block list of Blue’s verified Github accounts, while beloved denim meme account took such a strong stance on #BlockTheBlue it looks like Elon Musk gave him a blue check to troll him.
There is some merit in this: cryptospam accounts they have leveraged Twitter Blue to increase their own visibility, while others simply post vile shots. But for some online creators and sex workers, Twitter Blue is essential to surviving on the platform, even if they don’t support Musk’s changes to Twitter.
“People are motivated to pay for software based on use case, not political leaning,” explained Ashley, a sex worker and researcher who declined to share her full name.
For sex workers, who have been repeatedly unplatformed, forbidden in the shadow and with no life-sustaining sources of income, $8 is worth the safety net that Twitter Blue provides. In addition to a blue check, which some subscribers don’t even want as it now carries a stigma, Twitter Blue offers priority search rankings, SMS two-factor authentication, and longer video uploads.
“I think we can point to concrete evidence that having Twitter Blue will increase your visibility,” said Dr. Olivia Snow, a dominatrix who researches sex work and technology policy at the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Research. For sex workers who are often subject to shadowbanning and deprioritization in search results, Twitter Blue’s automatic boost is very important.
Along with Reddit, Twitter is the only major social platform that allows users to upload sexually explicit content. For sex workers, Twitter is essential to direct potential clients to their paid offers on sites like OnlyFans.
“Twitter is really the main advertising venue right now for sex workers,” Snow told TechCrunch.
The spreadsheet used by #BlockTheBlue advocates lists nearly 400,000 accounts. Ashley said she pulled up a smaller list of 300 accounts, which she analyzed for information about who is using Twitter Blue.
“Nothing stands out,” he told TechCrunch. “It’s not a targeted list by any means. The only thing I could say is that among the most followed accounts, a lot of them are people of color and non-English speaking accounts.”
TechCrunch repeated a similar experiment, pulling fifty random names from the spreadsheet. About half of these users did not speak English and five openly expressed right-wing or anti-LGBTQ views, but did not appear to be deliberately harassing anyone. Still, these sample sizes are quite small compared to the hundreds of thousands of users with Twitter Blue.
“Among the English accounts, I also feel that they are mostly creators, people who might want to upload videos longer than two minutes, fan accounts or freelance journalists,” Ashley said. she pointed unicorn riota left-wing media outlet, who subscribes to Twitter Blue in order to upload full clips of their video journalism.
Amanda Golka, a passing youtuber swell of entertainment, signed up for Twitter Blue to get access to text-based two-factor authentication. She told TechCrunch that once Twitter made this a paid feature, she encountered bugs that prevented her from signing up for three different types of app-based two-factor authentication, which is not paid. Sure enough, she was hacked. When she finally got her account back, she subscribed to Twitter Blue.
“I’ll immediately put in my description box, ‘I’m not happy about Twitter Blue either,'” Golka said in a post. Youtube video. “I just want two-factor authentication.”
For creators like Golka, persistent issues with enabling app-based two-factor authentication make Twitter Blue essential. Without her, he feels vulnerable to losing track of her again and worries that a hacker will try to scam her followers.
Sex workers are also concerned about bad actors scamming their followers. Although the blue check has lost much of its former meaning, Twitter has taken some steps to make it harder (but not impossible) to impersonate people. So having a blue check can still indicate legitimacy to potential customers. Twitter removes a user’s blue tick if they change their display name, for example. Some begrudging verified users have taken advantage of this feature by periodically changing their name in order to hide their check.
“Some sex workers feel more motivated to get [the blue check] to make sure they get it before others,” Ashley told TechCrunch. “We know from customer feedback that it helps set them apart from catfish.”
Ashley said clients of sex workers are sometimes scammed when hackers impersonate them and ask for money.
“As much as the meme accounts have catfish too, the sex workers are the ones whose fans get scammed out of thousands of dollars,” Ashley said. “This takes tens of thousands of dollars out of the pockets of sex workers.”
The use cases for Twitter Blue are variable, so sex workers see it as a form of censorship when potentially well-meaning figures support #BlockTheBlue. While some argue that a payment to Elon Musk is an unspoken form of support, Snow says that we are all lining Musk’s pockets even by using Twitter, and Twitter Blue. has barely made a dent in the final result of the platform, anyway.
“We have to earn money to live and eat, and Twitter is by far the biggest driver of traffic to OnlyFans,” Snow said. “What else are we supposed to do? We are not allowed on other platforms.”
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