Twitter User Spots Design Flaw in New Golden Checkmark

By Russ Burlingame

Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter and announced that he would be selling blue checks for a monthly fee, the whole "verified" system has been under a ton of scrutiny. With Twitter seemingly making spur-of-the-moment decisions without considering their consequences, and question about whether doing so has violated an agreement the previous management made with the government, there has been quite a lot of conversation around the change. Along the way, concern over what advertisers think seems to have contributed to the creation of another level of verification, the "official" check. The gold check is something you can't apply for, and it's awarded by Twitter unilaterally to brand and government accounts.

And, apparently, there's a few pixels out of place that's driving one user crazy. Saying that they are checking to see if Design Twitter is still out there, they shared a zoomed-in image of the gold checkmark.

Hey, at least it presumably proves that nobody just lazily took the blue check and flood-filled it. Look on the bright side!

"I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans," Musk said when the deal closed in April. "Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it."  

Since then, Twitter has been mired in nonstop controversy. Musk tried to back out of the deal, and was ordered by a court to abide by the agreement he had come to with previous ownership. Then, upon taking over, he has seemingly spent a huge chunk of his time trolling users, getting into fights, and unilaterally making arbitrary rules. Even among people who closely align with Musk politically, there is a lot of skepticism about his management of the company, which almost immediately lost about half of its advertisers when he took over.

Musk has promised total, unfettered free speech, which drove away corporate advertisers worried that the platform could become a haven for scammers and hate speech as a result. He has suggested that the way to recoup some of that money is through the sale of the verified blue check, putting the onus on users rather than advertisers to keep the social media giant afloat.

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