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Items tagged with: TwitterVerification
No checkmark, no domain name, no problem: other ways to verify your Bluesky self
As the ongoing flight from Twitter has continued, it’s been heartening to see so many familiar names show up on Bluesky, the Twitter alternative that comes closest to replicating what I liked about Twitter when it wasn’t run by a shitposting billionaire with a toxic social-media diet and a victimhood complex.
At least, I think those are familiar names. But because Bluesky’s only equivalent of Twitter’s now-ruined verification system is changing DNS settings to set your domain name as your handle there, I can’t assume that somebody popping up on Bluesky with a username, profile picture and bio matching their Twitter self is actually the same person.
As the newsroom saying goes, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”
My first move in those cases is to check the Twitter profile of the person whom I think has jumped into the Bluesky escape pod. If their Twitter display name, bio or pinned tweet shows a Bluesky handle, I’m all set. If it doesn’t, I’ll search their tweets for “bluesky” or “bsky” (the latter being part of a standard Bluesky handle).
If that doesn’t work but I’ve already confirmed that this person is on Mastodon, I’ll check their profile on that federated social network for a Bluesky mention. If that doesn’t yield any confirmation, I’ll check the person’s Web page, blog or author profile.
My last resort is to see who follows this person on Bluesky. And sometimes that works: After seeing somebody who appeared to be the staffer for my Congressman who offers informed and sarcastic commentary on House politics on Twitter surface on Bluesky without mentioning that on the site that Elon Musk has renamed to “X,” I checked the guy’s followers list on Bluesky and saw that my tech-savvy Rep. Don Beyer (D.-Va.) was among them. That seemed good enough for me.
But if you want to make it easy for potential followers on Bluesky, don’t make them do all that research. Tell people how to find you there in some public and obvious way, whether it’s a tweet, an update to your Twitter profile, or an edit to whatever corner of the Web you can rewrite at will. And on that note: Yes, I really am robpegoraro.com on Bluesky.
#Bluesky #BlueskyDomainNameHandle #BlueskyIdentity #BlueskyUser #bsky #socialMediaVerification #TwitterVerification
TechScape: Threads and Bluesky need to figure out what they want to be
In this week’s newsletter: The Twitter alternatives are gaining ground, and it wouldn’t take much to steal X’s crown as a news-sharing serviceJosh Taylor (The Guardian)
A Threadful plot twist in the race to displace Twitter
Eight months ago, when Twitter was already starting to spring self-inflicted leaks in the first few weeks of Elon Musk’s chaotic mismanagement, I wrote here that I didn’t know how I’d replace it. Musk’s incompetence at social media has only grown more obvious since, but now that multiple plausible candidates have emerged to replace a sinking Twitter–each with a flaw or flaws that can seem fatal in the least-flattering light–I still don’t know how this ends.The first one is Mastodon, the federated, open-source social network on which I’ve built the largest following (well, in relative terms, since the nearly 1,200 people following my @robpegoraro@journa.host account there is a small fraction of the nearly 19,000 people/bots following me on Twitter). After months of daily use, I’ve realized I love having an edit button more than I thought I would and don’t mind the lack of a quoting feature as much as I’d feared. And I’ve found the discourse to be remarkably less toxic than on Twitter–I think I’ve only blocked one person for their annoyingness.
But the lack of full-text search makes Mastodon borderline useless for following the news or just looking for reports of the same bug in an app. And although Mastodon management says such a feature is coming, the clunky UX required to follow people on different instances makes Mastodon a tough sell to people whose eyes don’t light up at the phrase “open source”–which, I hate to admit, is most people.
And while many of the people whose words I most enjoyed on Twitter have shown up on Mastodon, that migration has been uneven across different professional sectors. For example, while information-security professionals have largely made themselves at home there, few political types have. And almost none of the #brands have shown up, perhaps because there’s no formal advertising support on Mastodon. And does a social network even exist if you can’t @ an airline on it while you sit out a flight delay?
The second one is Bluesky, a project launched by Twitter in 2019 and spun out in 2022 as a public-benefit corporation. It offers most of Twitter’s features, including full-text search and quoting, and adds more flexible feed-filtering and content moderation otions. Its decentralized “AT Protocol” lets you take not just your handle and followers (as allowed by the ActivityPub protocol Mastodon employs) but also your past posts to a new server. And since you can change your original [name].bluesky.social handle to your domain name–for instance, you can now find me there as @robpegoraro.com–you can get a handle that won’t look out of place after you swap servers.
Bluesky now seems to be drawing more of the people whose banter I valued on Twitter–while some of the people who had first latched on to Mastodon as their Twitter escape pod now post more on Bluesky. But since joining Bluesky still requires getting through a waitlist or getting an invitation code, it’s not going to grow that big or grow that fast for now.
(While I’m making feature requests, I need to see Bluesky support two-factor authentication and would very much like to see it add an edit button and ship an iPad app.)
Wednesday night brought a third major option, Meta’s Threads. It launched with the gargantuan advantage of an enormous potential installed base consisting of most Instagram users–European residents excluded until Meta can make this app comply with EU privacy regulations. They only have to install the Threads app for Android or iOS and tap through a few screens and dialogs to sign in with their Instagram account and copy over their username, profile pic and bio before surfacing on Threads with their old social graph already developing as if it were a Polaroid picture.
As of Friday, that jetpack-boosted onboarding had resulted in Threads exceeding 70 million accounts. The people I knew on Twitter have arrived in force and so have the brands, since so many of them were already using Insta for marketing.
But even though Threads comes closest to replicating the membership of Twitter, it feels less like it than either Mastodon or Bluesky. Because at the moment, it only offers an algorithmic feed that regularly spotlights accounts I don’t follow and often overloads me with posts from some of the more prolific people I do follow. It feels like I joined a party where I expected to meet up with friends, then quickly found myself outnumbered by loud-mouthed strangers. Threads can seem inspired not so much by Twitter as TikTok… which I don’t mean as a huge compliment.
Threads also suffers from being confined to iOS and Android apps for now and also lacking an edit button. But my biggest objection to Threads can’t be solved by Meta shipping any new code–it’s the fact that this platform is owned by the same company behind Facebook and Instagram, on which I already spend too much time, to which I’ve already provided enough of my data, and which has shown itself inept at dispatching fake accounts. And even more so than Twitter, Meta’s history of launching features and products for journalists and creators and then smashing the Undo button on those ventures has stained it with a record of faithlessness unmatched in the social-media business.
As my friend and former Yahoo Tech colleague Dan Tynan wrote on this Substack Friday: “when our hope for salvation is Mark Zuckerberg, we may already be doomed.”
To its credit, Meta does plan to add ActivityPub support to Threads–meaning you could follow the people you like on Threads in any Mastodon client, avoid being force-fed all the #influencer #content and keep more of your data safely distant from Meta’s gravity well. That might be the post-Twitter solution that checks off my major boxes (those being “not be under the whim of a billionaire,” “help make me smarter by introducing me to experts,” “let me indulge my taste for writing punny ledes and headlines,” and “not make me feel dirty for being there”). But in the meantime, the prospect of having to tend four different text-based social platforms is making me question my life choices.
#ActivityPub #ATProtocol #Bluesky #decentralizedSocialMedia #ElonMuskTwitter #federatedSocialMedia #Instagram #MarkZuckerberg #Mastodon #meta #socialGraph #Threads #Twitter
The value of my Twitter checkmark is just about zero now
It cost me nothing but a little bit of my time to get a then-coveted verification badge for my Twitter account in the fall of 2014, and lately that checkmark icon seems worth nothing–if it isn’t already worth less than nothing.
In the latest of a long series of own goals by Twitter overlord Elon Musk, he’s skipped from offering verification as a new perk for people who pay $8 a month for “Twitter Blue” to dissing people with “legacy verification” badges with a “May or may not be notable” label to saying those “legacy blue checks” will go away “in a few months” to setting an April 1 date to start that expiration process to changing the label for both old-school and new-school verification badges to this uselessly vague text: “This account is verified because it’s subscribed to Twitter Blue or is a legacy verified account.”
So now those of us who got our verification badges the old-fashioned way have nothing to distinguish ourselves from the chumps who handed over $8 a month ($11 a month if you paid in Twitter’s mobile apps). And the people who voted with their wallets have nothing visually setting them apart from the unelected elites who had won favor among the old regime. And random Twitter users have no way to tell an account that was subject to some human verification from one that provided a working credit card. We are all losers now.
I have less room to complain than most badge holders, having obtained this status via some in-person schmoozing of a Twitter rep at the Online News Association’s 2014 conference. I followed up over e-mail, providing links to my work at five different news sites, and 11 days later got a “Congratulations! Your account has been verified” e-mail from Twitter.
I know many other people who should have met the nebulous verification guidelines never got awarded that “blue-check” status. (Fact check: As anybody can see, the icon consists of a white checkmark inside a blue circle.) It wasn’t a fair fight then and it isn’t one now.
It is, however, now comical that Musk has managed to make both legacy and paid verification worthless with that new label, perhaps because technical debt makes bulk-deleting legacy verification too difficult. As the Washington Post reported: “Removal of verification badges is a largely manual process powered by a system prone to breaking, which draws on a large internal database — similar to an Excel spreadsheet — in which verification data is stored.”
So far, the only notable check mark that’s actually been pulled has been that of the New York Times’ main account, which Musk apparently had yanked to show off that he could. That stunt is one more reminder–since followed by Musk applying a “state-affiliated media” label to NPR’s account, a move he now seems to be having second thoughts about–that Twitter has become the vanity project of a shitposting billionaire suffering from delusions of social-media competence.
#blueCheck #ElonMuskTwitter #legacyVerification #Twitter8 #TwitterBlue #TwitterCheckmark #TwitterVerification #TwitterVerified
Twitter’s old blue checks are finally gone — sort of
The ridiculous but important Twitter check mark fiasco, explained.Sara Morrison (Vox)
Good Twitter, bad Twitter (latest in a series)
Friday neatly encapsulated what I still like about Twitter and what I’ve increasingly grown to hate at the service under its new and erratic management. I know which slice of the service I want to see prevail, but I increasingly doubt that will happen.First, let’s cover the good side of Twitter. Friday afternoon, I tweeted out my confusion at seeing Twitter owner/overlord Elon Musk declare his intention to liberate 1.5 billion usernames that had been abandoned for years. Could there be that many abandoned accounts when Twitter reported only 237.8 million monetizable daily active users in its second quarter?
Seven minutes later, tech journalist Tom Maxwell replied that he’d heard former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo say on a podcast that 80 percent of new users abandoned it after a day. I asked if he happened to remember the name of the podcast, and about half an hour later he replied with a link to the podcast episode in which former exec Ryan Sarver (see, memory can lead any of us astray) said the service had already hit a billion abandoned accounts when he left in 2013.
Unexpected and fast enlightenment on a subject is always a delight, and Twitter remains remarkably effective at that.
Then came Friday’s night edition of Twitter Files, Musk’s attempt to smear the previous management’s content-moderation practices as an in-kind contribution to the Democratic Party. Matt Taibbi, one of a few writers to whom Musk has given vast access to internal documents and records, uncorked an overwrought, 67-tweet thread about the booting of President Trump from the platform after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that portrayed Trump as the real victim.
Taibbi’s unwillingness to note the essential context–that by repeatedly lying about election procedures, Trump was violating published rules in a way that would have gotten a less high-profile account booted a long time ago–makes this thread and all its screengrabs of Slack threads an infuriating read. Especially if you, like me, served as a poll worker in the 2020 election.
But Taibbi, like his Twitter Files collaborator Bari Weiss and his recent Twitter cheerleader Glenn Greenwald, seems to have made rejecting the Establishment Narrative part of a personal #brand. Even if that requires him to call a Trump tweet demanding that every mail-in ballot uncounted by the end of Election Day remain uncounted–thereby disenfranchising millions of Americans–“fairly anodyne.”
This thread and two earlier threads in this series–one Dec. 8 from Weiss, one Dec. 2 from Taibbi–have also revealed some interesting details about how content moderation decisions happen quickly behind the scenes, often on the basis of incomplete and fast-moving information, and how undocumented much of this corporate gear-grinding has been.
But as many others have noted, they don’t show a conspiracy afoot unless you think content moderation should parcel out equal pain on both parties. And that is an absurd expectation when so much of the GOP under Trump has bought into lies about elections, vaccines, climate change, trans people, all non-straight people, and so much else that have no comparable counterparts among Dems.
(I remain anxious to see party politics ease down to conversations about which problems actually require the government’s intervention and how to do that in the most efficient and effective manner.)
But because Twitter is also a context-destroying machine, and because Musk has been amplifying these alleged exposés to his nearly 121 million followers, I expect that many more people now believe this fraudulent depiction of how Twitter struggled to apply its published rules to an increasingly deranged president. And to keep its spaces palatable to the advertisers that keep it in business.
What must those advertisers now think about Musk ransacking Twitter and letting neo-Nazis, QAnon kooks, and Charlottesville and January 6 rioters back on the platform? And how do they feel about Musk’s most recent meltdowns, in which he’s lashed out at past Twitter employees for allegedly ignoring child sex abuse on the platform and then called Twitter “both a social media company and a crime scene”?
Musk may yet realize that he has a business to run, and that business is not providing “fan service for aggrieved conservatives who exist in the Fox News Extended Universe,” as George Washington University professor Dave Karpf tweeted Friday.
But Musk has a lot of money, even if the bank loans he took on to complete the Twitter purchase he spent months trying to wriggle out of leave his new property owing more than $1 billion a year in interest. He can probably afford to stew in his rapidly-curdling delusions for a while.
Either way, it might be prudent to leave my @robpegoraro Twitter handle off my next batch of business cards.
#abandonedTwitterAccounts #BariWeiss #BigLie #contentModeration #electionIntegrity #ElonMuskTwitter #Jan6 #MattTaibbi #TrumpTweets #TwitterFiles #TwitterMisinformation
Elon Musk, Under Financial Pressure, Pushes to Make Money From Twitter
The billionaire and his advisers have discussed adding paid direct messages, fees to watch videos and other features to the service.Mike Isaac (The New York Times)
Whither Twitter
Twitter has occupied an embarrassingly large part of my online existence since the spring of 2008–a span of years that somehow exceeds my active tenure on Usenet. But the past two weeks of Twitter leave me a lot less certain about how much time I will or should spend on that service.
I did not have high expectations in April when Elon Musk–who, never forget, already has two full-time jobs at just Tesla and SpaceX–offered to buy Twitter. He had already revealed a low-resolution understanding of content moderation on social platforms but took the advice of a clique of tech bros and told Twitter’s board that he had the answers: “Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it.”
Seeing Musk then spend months and what could be $100 million in legal fees trying to squirm out of his accepted, above-market offer of $54.20 a share did not elevate those expectations.
Just before a court case he probably would have lost, Musk gave in, threw $44 billion ($13 billion borrowed) on the table and took over Twitter on Oct. 28. He quickly sacked a handful of top executives before firing about half of the workforce with careless cruelty. One friend figured he’d gotten canned when he couldn’t log into his work laptop.
Things have skidded downhill since. On Twitter, Musk keeps showing himself an easy mark for far-right conspiracy liars and the phony complaints of online trolls; in its offices, he’s ordered a rushed rollout of an $8/month subscription scheme that grants the blue-circled checkmark of a verified account, on the assumption that credit-card payment processors will catch fraudsters.
The predictable result: a wave of fake but “verified” accounts impersonating the likes of Eli Lilly, Nintendo, George W. Bush, Lockheed Martin, Telsa and Musk himself.
Also predictable: Twitter advertisers reacting to this chaos and their fear of wobbly content moderation (rejected by Musk) by smashing the Esc key on their spending plans until they can figure out what’s going on. Musk has responded by whining that companies pausing ad campaigns amounts to them “trying to destroy free speech in America.”
As for legacy verified accounts like my own, Musk has oscillated from saying that they’d require the same $8/month charge to suggesting they’d continue to saying they will be dropped–while also introducing, yanking and then resurfacing gray-checkmark icons for certain larger organizations over a 36-hour period. Oh, and not paying your $8 a month might mean your tweets fall down a bit bucket.
After a Thursday that saw Twitter’s chief information security officer, chief privacy officer, and chief complaince officer resign by early morning, Musk told the remaining employees at an all-hands meeting that “Bankruptcy isn’t out of the question.” Since Twitter now owes more than $1 billion a year in interest on the debt from Musk’s acquisition, that warning seems reasonable.
I am not writing this out of schadenfreude. As much as Twitter can drive me nuts (what is it with the militantly stupid people in my replies?), I’ve found it enormously helpful as a public notebook, a shortcut to subject-matter experts, an on-demand focus group, and an ongoing exercise in short-form prose. As (I think) my Washington Post colleague Frank Ahrens once observed, Twitter lets journalists write the New York City tabloid headlines we couldn’t get away with in our own newsrooms.
If Twitter really does implode, which now seems a much more real possibility even if a roundtrip through Chapter 11 is more likely, I don’t know how I’d replace it.
Many of the people I follow there are advancing evacuation plans on a federated, non-commercial, somewhat confusing social platform–not Usenet, but Mastodon.
I have taken tentative steps to do likewise, in the sense that I created one account on the well-known server Mastodon.Social and then realized I’d created a separate account on the xoxo.zone server in 2018 after hearing Mastodon talked up at a meetup during the XOXO conference in Portland. Now I need to decide which account to keep and which one to migrate, and indecision over that makes it easier to stay on Twitter and watch it burn.
Meanwhile, seeing Musk’s stark, public display of incompetence continues to leave me baffled when I compare that to the Musk venture I know best, SpaceX. If Musk ran SpaceX this impulsively and with this little willingness to learn from others, multiple launch pads at Cape Canaveral would be smoking holes in the ground.
Instead, SpaceX is the leading provider of launch services in the world, sending Falcon 9 rockets to space and landing their first stages for reuse on a better-than-weekly basis. “Transformational” is not too strong of a word for what SpaceX has accomplished since it first orbited a prototype Dragon capsule in December of 2010; this part of Musk’s career ought to be Presidential Medal of Freedom material, with bipartisan applause.
(I got to see that reentry-singed Dragon capsule up close in July of 2011 when NASA hosted a Tweetup at the Kennedy Space Center for the final Space Shuttle launch, yet another experience I owe in some way to Twitter.)
I keep hoping that I will see this sort of steely-eyed focus in Musk’s stewardship of Twitter. Instead, he appears to be off to an even worse start than I could have imagined. And I can imagine quite a bit.
#contentModeration #ElonMuskTwitterAcquisition #federatedSocial #Mastodon #microblogging #socialMedia #SpaceX #Tesla #tweetup #Twitter #TwitterVerification #XOXO
joint-highest civilian award of the United States, bestowed by the President
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)AirDrop apologists have some opinions
Who knew suggesting that an Apple interface enabled undesirable outcomes and ought to be changed would be so controversial? Me–I’ve been critiquing Apple’s products since before the company was doooomed in 1996.But even so, the level of enraged techsplaining that greeted last weekend’s Yahoo post about AirDrop file-sharing has been something else. To recap that briefly: While AirDrop’s default contacts-only setting is safe, accepting a file transfer from somebody not in your contacts requires setting it to “Everyone”–a setting that does not time out but does automatically display a preview of the incoming image. The predictable result: creeps spamming strangers who had set AirDrop to Everyone and then forgot to change it back, and by “spamming” I mean “sending dick pics from iPhones with anonymous names.”
(For more details, see my Aug. 2017 USA Today column or this Dec. 4 post from the security firm Sophos.)
Suggesting that Apple have the Everyone setting time out or not auto-preview images did not go over well the people–most apparently men–who filled the replies to my tweet Sunday sharing the post. Let me sum up the major points these individuals vainly attempted to make, as seen in quotes from their tweets:
• “It’s contacts only by default.” Yes, and if nobody ever interacted with people who weren’t in their contacts and offered to use this handy feature to share in a file, you would have a point. As is, this request comes up all the time–my wife saw it from Apple Store employees–as I explained in the post that these techbros apparently did not finish reading.
• “Still trying to make a big deal of something I’ve never experienced.” Thank you, sir, for proving my exact point about the problems of having development teams dominated by white men. As writing about “Gamergate” made obvious, things are often different for the rest of humanity, and “I don’t have this problem” is not a valid defense of a social feature without confirmation from people outside your demographic background. Sorry if asking you to acknowledge your privilege is so triggering, by which I mean I’m not sorry.
• “At some point, you have to take some goddamn responsibility.” Ah yes, the old blame-the-customer instinct. I hope the multiple people who expressed some version of “why are you coddling people too dumb to turn Everything off” don’t and never will work in any customer-facing role.
• “you don’t have to accept every airdrop item that comes in.” What part of “automatically display a preview” don’t you understand?
• “What I don’t understand is why these creeps aren’t reported by the receivers to authorities.” What part of “iPhones with anonymous names” don’t you understand? And before you next resort to victim blaming like this, you should really read up on the relevant history.
• “There are far worse UX issues in iOS if that is what you are concerned about.” News flash, whataboutists: I write about problems in the tech industry all the time. Stick around and you’ll see me take a whack at a company besides your sainted Apple.
And that brings me to the annoying subtext beneath all these aggrieved responses: The notion that questioning Apple’s design choice is an unreasonable stretch, so we should look anywhere else for solutions to what even most of my correspondents agreed was a problem. Well, if that’s your attitude, turn in your capitalist card: You’re not a customer, you’re a supplicant. And I don’t have to take your opinion here seriously.
#AirDrop #empathy #harmReduction #ios #mansplaining #misogyny #sexism #techBro #userEducation #userExperience #UX
How to prevent creeps from using Apple’s AirDrop to 'cyber flash'
Strangers can use Apple's AirDrop to harass users with unwanted photos. Here's how to keep your settings private.Robert Pegoraro, USA TODAY (USA TODAY)