How did the Twitter check mark become toxic? It took multiple strokes of business failure: first, by Musk making Twitter worse; second, by charging more for Twitter Blue at the same time that he was making the site worse; and third, by making himself an unappealing person for people to associate themselves with in public.
The blue check mark isn’t now just uncool, but to scores of people, it’s a mark of shame.
Twitter also needs to rid itself of trolls who harass users, and to close down its millions of false accounts. According to a website called Twitter Audit that analyses followers, 35% of Mr Dorsey’s own 3.8m followers are fake.
In short, while Twitter used to have an edge because it anticipated people’s desire to share news and details about their lives online, it has been painfully slow to defend the territory it helped popularise.
Advertisers go where users spend time.