 a month to genuinely verify their identity, which I thought was a good idea. Less than £7 seemed like a fair price to pay to go through the verification process and confirm that my profile was indeed me. So after seeing some friends and fellow content creators signing up, I took the plunge, hoping it would stop the impersonators in their tracks. I thought I would have to upload some form of ID to confirm I was me, but to my surprise, I was instantly given the famous blue tick without any kind of checks. I had misunderstood. Twitter Blue wasn't about proving you were a real person, to many of the people buying it, it was about ego – or, as we learned, playing pharmaceutical company stock-destroying pranks. I felt short-changed that my 'verification' didn't actually confirm my identity, but I also had to deal with the embarrassment. When I first noticed the blue badge that said, 'This account is verified because it's subscribed to Twitter Blue', outing me as someone who had paid, it made me want to remove it immediately. Unfortunately, I can't until next month – when I can choose to stop paying the subscription fee. I didn't tweet in the few days afterwards, and even posted about not wanting to share content with that tick by my name. But being a content cr){kind=link}
NEWS… BUT NOT AS YOU KNOW IT
I was looking forward to getting a blue tick.
I’ve been a content creator across various platforms for the last 13 years – becoming quite well known on Tumblr, Instagram and Twitter – but I’ve never been verified on any of them.
It’s meant that, over the years, fake accounts pretending to be me have consistently popped up. I’ve even had followers DM me to tell me that others have been using my photo to catfish people across social media and dating apps.
It’s a really unnerving feeling to know you’re not in full control of your image or what ‘you’ are saying online.