With a change to the verification process on Twitter, many see this as another opportunity to engineer chaos.
Anonymity and pseudonyms have their place. People reporting out from authoritarian regimes or writing novels in another genre, are good examples.
But in an internet age in which news breaks by tweet, establishing trust doesn’t come through direct use of legacy media.
A reporter who works for CNN gains credibility through her institution. And the institution gets credibility by being included as a Spectrum cable channel. All this means a lot of people are connected to every bit of reporting she does.
Twitter’s famous blue checkmark is for verified identities. It’s for people who can prove they are the people they claim to be.
While there was some excitement when the checkmark was introduced; many felt special for getting one; that blue check mark was the only reason anyone could trust that the person tweeting was actually that person.
Since Elon Musk announced his plan to change that, many are outraged.
We Rely on Trust
Beware, though, of what it means to “democratize” the information and change that checkmark from verified to paid status.
This has been the challenge of increasingly-normalized disinformation over most of the last decade. If we reduce our trust in legacy journalism and equalize disinformation peddlers, how can we trust any of it?
Therefore , we must be skeptical of anyone who wants @WhiteGuy958723 to have the same credibility as any experienced reporter. Not because he can’t be right about something. But because we’re removing all credibility from the equation.
It is never whether a random person is right once in awhile or whether a reporter is ever wrong. Some would have us remove systems of trust and invite us to take one person’s word for it.
They are offering an anti-institutional worldview, but not a world without institutions. It means we’re likely to live with ones we can trust even less and which care about us even less.
The real question is who benefits from that? It isn’t you or me. And why would we trust anyone when we’ve destroyed the mechanisms that establish trust? We wouldn’t.
At some point we ought to acknowledge that maybe that is the plan.