Not since Nike’s famous swoosh has a tick taken on so much significance.

Like Don Quixote tilting at windmills, new Twitter owner Elon Musk has taken aim at the blue tick of verification offered by Twitter Blue like an idealistic maniac detached from reality.

WhatsApp has a double blue tick notification (of a message being read), but never has a blue tick been so obsessively debated.

It’s quite apparent that Musk has been fixated on the wrong thing.

“Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark,” he tweeted last week. This retreated Twitter Blue will offer “priority in replies, mentions & search, which is essential to defeat spam/scam”. 

He added: “Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.”

Yeah, right. Power to the people who pay $8 a month to have that power. That’s not power to the people – that’s capitalism. 

Sorry, there goes my verified status. It really isn’t worth R142 a month to me. 

Twitter has been the only social network I have taken seriously. I was always sceptical about Facebook and only accepted invitations from people I know in the real world – not even from the women in bikinis who seemed to proliferate in the early days.

As novelist Stephen King tweeted of the original price point: “$20 a month to keep my blue check? Fuck that, they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.”

Pushback works, it seems, even when you take a social network private.

But the key problem is that anyone can now achieve verified status. The process used to require vetting by Twitter staff was limited to public figures, politicians, musicians, actors, celebrities and journalists. 

To be a verified account now, simply says “I have $8”, as one person proclaimed.

“Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue,” Musk tweeted, “due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists.”

And, he added: “Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.”

Er, no. The activists are not the problem, and the fact that Musk can’t see that (or admit it in public) is more concerning. The first step in solving any problem is knowing that there is a problem. Or, if you’re the CEO of a company, knowing that you are the problem.

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As The Verge’s Nilay Patel so appropriately wrote: “Welcome to hell, Elon. You break it, you buy it.”

It’s pretty hard to disagree with that. After deciding against his April offer to purchase, Musk spent months deriding Twitter, questioning how many spam bots it has and besmirching its executives. Now he appears oblivious to how much damage he himself has caused.

“You fucked up real good, kiddo,” wrote Patel, who appropriately goes by the Twitter handle @reckless. 

“Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself, and there is no possible way to grow users and revenue without making a series of enormous compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your other companies.”

He added: “I say this with utter confidence because the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems.”

Indeed, they are. But it doesn’t seem like Musk’s sledgehammer approach is the way to do it. After firing half of Twitter’s 7,500 staff – by email – on 4 November, Twitter discovered a bunch of those engineers they let go were urgently needed and offered them their jobs back. 

Twitter then realised the much-publicised US midterm elections were happening in the same week, and held off on the radical $8-a-month changes. 

It’s this kind of radical about-turn that Musk is known for – but it’s not a winning strategy with a social network that relies on advertisers for 90% of its income. Those advertisers are rightly spooked and are holding back on their spending while they wait to see how Musk’s “chaos energy” approach to running Twitter will play out.

A leaked internal document – a frequently asked questions for advertisers – included the line: “Do the same rules apply to Elon as to everyone else on Twitter?” 

The answer in that document is “yes”, but it’s doubtful if anyone believes it, based on Musk’s radical behaviour.

As Patel points out, Twitter “makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway. You! You, Elon Musk, are addicted to Twitter. You’re the asset. 

“You just bought yourself for $44-billion.” 

Hard to disagree with that. BM/DM