A recent article in The Washington Post by Faiz Siddiqui and Jeremy Merrill presents data from a recent analysis of Twitter accounts that have subscribed to the $7.99 "Blue Verified" plan, unveiled in early November. The plan was only active for a few days before Elon Musk put it hold until November 29, 2022, to fix the many problems that quickly arose—including users creating fake accounts to masquerade as celebrities, politicians, and companies. During the short sign up period, about 150,000 accounts became Blue Verified, and an analysis of data compiled by a software developer revealed that many of those accounts promoted right-wing politics, cryptocurrency, and porn. The Washington Post breaks down the numbers:
Only a smidgen of the 150,000 Twitter Blue subscribers are fake or joke accounts, according to data compiled from Twitter's public data feed for software developers. A large portion of the most followed accounts that got "verified" via Twitter Blue, according to the data reviewed by The Post, are from a few specific subcommunities on Twitter: pornography, cryptocurrency advocates and overseas accounts, particularly from the Middle East.
The data was compiled by Berlin software developer Travis Brown and reviewed and verified by The Post.
According to the data, most of the members of a list of some 135,000 Twitter Blue subscribers were ordinary users with a few hundred followers who had been on the site for more than six years. (It's not clear how many had subscribed to the earlier, pre-Musk iteration of the Twitter Blue program.)
Read the rest of the article here.
