On Twitter, who needs a tick when you can have a rat?

CHENNAI: Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, wants $8. After buying Twitter in a $44 billion deal just last week, he now wants users to pay up if they want their account emblazoned with the platform’s signature blue check mark. (Currently, the check mark denotes a verified account.) Many users who are verified at present met the development with a laugh. The web comic artist Alex Cohen thinks a rat emoji makes for a fine, and free, alternative instead.

In a tweet on Tuesday, Musk derided what he called “Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark.” Twitter Blue, he added, would come with perks like limited ads, the ability to bypass some publisher paywalls and “priority in replies, mentions & search, which is essential to defeat spam/scam.” The blue check mark would come along with membership. (There is debate over whether the Twitter check mark is blue or white among some Twitter users, since the check mark itself is, technically, typically white.) “Power to the people! Blue for $8/month,” he wrote.

In response, Cohen, a 26-year-old political science graduate student at the University of California, Davis, tweeted his idea for an alternative to paying for Twitter verification. “Why would i pay $8 to get a blue check if i could put a rat next to my name for free??? i’m calling on everyone to join me in becoming #RatVerified,” Cohen wrote on Tuesday. He added a rat emoji to his display name on Twitter and encouraged other users to do the same. The tweet has since been liked 138,000 times and counting, and retweeted more than 17,000 times. “I’m not a big fan of Elon Musk and I don’t think it’s good someone can buy one of the most important websites for political and journalism purposes and then just change it and make it function completely differently without oversight,” Cohen said in a phone interview on Friday.

Twitter’s verification system was initially rolled out to help prevent impersonation on the platform. It was debuted in 2009, inspired by someone posing as Shaquille O’Neal. The Twitter account for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was the first to receive the distinction.

Since then, the check mark has become a somewhat contentious symbol. For public figures, including celebrities and journalists, it is a way to confirm that users are in fact who they claim to be. But to other users, the check mark has become a status symbol, unfairly reserved for a select group. It’s a sentiment Musk, with his feudalist metaphor, appears to share. (Full disclosure: I have a check mark, obtained for me years ago by an employer. Is it dorky? Yes. Does it help me do my job more efficiently? Also yes.)

Musk’s tweets about allowing all users to pay for verification particularly frustrated Cohen. Allowing anybody to be verified seemed to defeat the very reason verification was created in the first place, he said. “I have had, on multiple occasions, spam accounts pretend to be me,” Cohen said. “Try and do fake giveaways and get people to give away their credit card info. It takes a lot of effort if you’re not verified to get those accounts removed and there’s a lot of danger from people falling for those scams.”

“I’ve never been, like, very upset that I don’t have it,” Cohen said of verification. “I don’t really care about it as, like, a badge of honor. But from a practical standpoint, that’s why this exists. That’s why this was created: to prevent people from being scammed.”

Kircher is a reporter with NYT©2022