31st March 2022
Some people who care about these things are upset when they don’t have a ‘blue tick’ verification mark on their Twitter account.
Some people who care even more about these things are upset when, for whatever reason, their cherished ‘blue tick’ is removed.
I happen to have a high-follower Twitter account – where I tweet about things where credibility and indeed verification can be important – but I do not have and do not want a ‘blue tick’.
(Indeed, I have refused one.)
Why?
Isn’t credibility and verification important?
Well.
There are different ways of having credibility and different methods of verification.
I tweet (and blog) about the law, but I rarely say expressly that I am legally qualified.
This is because I want the content of my commentary itself to have credibility, rather than to appeal to authority.
If I have to resort to ‘actually I am a solicitor’ then something has gone astray in my commentary.
Either I get the law right or I get the law wrong – and in neither case should having ‘lawyer’ or ‘solicitor’ in my bio make any difference, still less a ‘blue tick’ against my name.
(I have a similar problem with lawyers who insist on having ‘QC’ on their social media account, as if their tweets are court pleadings, or formal advices or opinions.)
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Indeed, in my opinion the ‘blue tick’ can confer a false sense of authority.
A view can be taken that a thing must be true or fair – just because it has been tweeted (or re-tweeted) by a ‘blue tick’ account.
Yet nasty and vile tweets can be tweeted by ‘blue tick’ accounts, as well as factually false information.
This is because a ‘blue tick’ is not actually a badge of credibility or verification, but – too often – a substitute for one.
Such an objection, however, does not mean that anything goes.
Instead, it means people should be critical with what they engage on social media.
Ask questions: who follows an account, who does an account frequently engage with, what are the replies and quote-tweets of a tweet, does the tweeter link to sources – and so on.
Forming your own view, in other words – rather than nodding-along with a false badge of authority.
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I know the easy response to this will be for some to say that I misunderstand social media – and that people do not want to think for themselves.
But – we are still in the early history of social media and internet-based global communications, and we should not mistake what social media is like now with what it may become.
We could all shout at strangers in the street or on the bus – but almost nobody does, even though the opportunity is there.
And similarly people may become more measured and sensible in how they interact on social media.
The best regulation, in my view, comes from – where possible – empowering people to make informed decisions.
And the arbitrary and non-transparent system of ‘blue ticks’ – which confer respectability on some unpleasant and/or false tweets – is the means of encouraging people to not make informed decisions, rather than making them.
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I agree.
If I recall correctly, Jean-Paul Sartre, turned. down the Nobel Prize with the same reasoning; he said he wanted people to judge his books on their contents rather than that they were labelled as written by a Nobel Prize winner.
On blue ticks: when looking at tweets written by people who have many fake accounts using their name, they help me identify the true authors.
This may be the only time I am compared with a Nobel Prize contender, and so I shall cherish it
Not just a contender: Sartre was in fact awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize for Literature, but he refused to accept it (although it has been rumoured that he later asked for the money). Nearly 20 years before he had refused the Légion d’honneur.
The only other person (so far) to voluntarily refuse a Nobel Prize was the North Vietnamese politician Le Duc Tho, awarded the 1973 Peace Prize jointly with Henry Kissinger. Tho declined, saying there was no peace yet, but Kissinger accepted his share of the prize.
The Russian government forced Boris Pasternak to decline the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature, but 29 years after his death it was accepted on his behalf by his son in 1989.
And then Carl von Ossietzky, Andrei Sakharov, Aung San Suu Kyi and Liu Xiaobo were unable to accept the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935, 1975, 1991 and 2010 respectively, as they were detained by the governments in Nazi Germany, the USSR, Myanmar, and the PRC respectively.
Most of the time, I agree with the Royal Society’s motto, “Nullius in verba” (loosely, “take nobody’s word for it”). You could add the Russian proverb, “Доверяй, но проверяй” (trust but verify).
‘Contender,’ I thought, ‘a nice neutral word in these exceptional circumstances,’ I thought, ‘nobody will quibble with that…’
There is another less-well-known reason for having a Blue Tick – it seems to offer some protection against algorithm-based account suspensions, or perhaps it just ensures complaints are seen by more senior moderators. Certainly, I get significantly less grief in terms of complaint-bombing with a Blue Tick on Twitter than those without, and one only has to look at the recent suspension of the TransMediaWatch Twitter account for a completely innocuous tweet posting a link to a major news outlet to see the problems it can cause.
That links into the problems of regulation, of course. Social Media networks simply cannot keep up with the volume of complaints, many made in bad faith, in any fashion that makes economic sense. Pushing this on to social medial companies is, in my view, the wrong answer as there is no real consequence of engaging in abusive behaviour. As you note, we don’t go round shouting rude things at strangers on the bus. Why? Because there are real world consequences. Yet the police typically take things happening online less seriously. If a twitter post was, in law, equated to shouting something in a pub or venue with the same number of people in as you have followers and prosecutions flowed from that, people would soon realise that they need to moderate their behaviour online as much as in person.
Funny you should mention the rank obsessed members of the bar who add ‘QC’ all over their social media accounts. I was lead 20 years ago by a QC who, when I added ‘solicitor advocate’ to my name, on a document we had prepared urged me to leave it off. There was no need to ‘ghettoise’ myself. And I have done so ever since, leaving my written work – I hope – to speak for itself.
I have baffled, if not annoyed folk on Twitter by citing examples to back up a point or observation.
I have in consequence more than once had to explain that it is hardly a novel practice for, say, civil servants (or lawyers) to in particular support an argument or proposal with examples to which people will relate and reference to acknowledged experts.
An approach I have always considered to lend authority to any reference I might make to my past career.
Arguably, have we not failed to convince if our learning and experience do not come out through our words?
I am a particular fan of the inclusive rhetorical style of David Lloyd George. He spoke with his audiences and not to them, using language and experiences to which he knew they would relate without feeling they were being patronised.
I gather Lloyd George was quite a lawyer before he took up politics full time.
That was because Lloyd George was a solicitor and not a barrister
Take it away, Douglas Adams …
“All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.”
He did rather anticipate Twitter.
“You can’t trust what people tell you on the web anymore than you can what you’re told on megaphones or in restaurants.”
I agree on the credibility point, credibility should be based on merit, not a title or a tick.
I’ve got mixed feelings on the verification though. In rare cases it can help me to understand/check that an account is the real thing, although I think in the majority there are other better indicators. If there is [celebrityperson] with 1.2M followers and a long history of tweets and [celebrityperson_] with 39 followers and 3 tweets from the last 2 days I think it’s fairly easy to determine which one is the real one and which one the fake. The problem is that many people don’t make the effort to check if an account is real/plausible and just retweet what they think came from someone important, even if that was [celebrityperson_]. The blue tick verification might help a little in these cases, although not much.
I thought most Twitter accounts with “QC” on the name also had things like “Chelsea FC/proud dad/University of Life” in their bio, along with St. George’s Crosses and the Star of David?
A strange phenomena, which I never truly understood… Then again, none of those had blue ticks, either.
To me, the purpose of the blue tick is not to confer authority on the person tweeting, but to confirm identity. It’s not saying “David Allen Green has interesting things to say”, but rather “These things are being said by *the* David Allen Green, rather than someone else pretending to be David Allen Green or some other person whose name is David Allen Green, but is not *the* David Allen Green”.
Where the person is noted for expertise, this shouldn’t matter – the expertise in general should be self-evident from the tweet. But for a journalist noted for their contacts, saying “my contacts say X” does depend on you being who you say you are / are believed to be. If Laura Kuenssberg wrote “my contacts say that Boris Johnson is going to resign next week”, then that would be relevant only because the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg has contacts that would be likely to know that and be prepared to tell her. Some other Laura Kuenssberg’s contacts might be their husband and their cat for all we know.
This is equally true for politicians or celebrities, or official spokespeople, or brand accounts. If what you are saying has more significance because it is *you* that is saying it then it’s important to distinguish between the famous/powerful person and other people who have the same name.
But when DAG publishes legal analysis, what matters is the legal analysis, not that it’s DAG’s analysis – so the blue tick makes no difference.
If another ‘David Allen Green’ gave useful and correct legal commentary, why would it matter if it wasn’t me?
The difficulty is more if another David Allen Green gives bad legal commentary, thus damaging your reputation as a thoughtful legal commentator.
More likely it would enhance it, if they were better than me!
Well.
I’m sure we’d know if it was someone else. ;)
I see what you did there.
Agreed. We’ve never sought a blue tick for Law & Religion UK because what would be the point? What we post stands or falls on its merits – if we write tendentious drivel, people will simply stop reading the blog. A blue tick signifies nothing whatsoever.
I’m not sure that the analogy with disclosing you’re a solicitor works (or even the analogy with disclosing someone is a QC, which is itself a curious phenomenon).
Originally, the point of the blue tick was to help people tell the difference between authentic accounts and forgeries and/or parodies. The fact that Twitter users may place more weight on it than that seems something that should be rejected/resisted. Someone who is at little risk of being imitated or parodied could reasonable reject the offer of a Blue Tick for that reason.
On the other hand, disclosing that you have expertise seems fair enough, particularly in a medium where brevity is unavoidable. I really do think that people should think twice about disagreeing with someone in their area of expertise when they don’t have the same expertise. Disclosing your training and professional background seems like a reasonable way to carve out an area where only other experts should accuse you of talking nonsense.
(Of course, actual social media doesn’t work that way. But it would be nice if it did.)
I wonder if the blue tick is somewhere along the same pendulum swing from an earlier thread on which there was a discussion of the wisdom and/or pitfalls of permitting anonymous posting on social media platforms?
My reluctance to support the idea of mandatory, verifiable authentication is that it may inadvertently risk impinging on free speech, on whistleblowing and related activities. (Yes, I concede that use of Twitter with regards to whistleblowing might seem like a stretch, but it is a mechanism through which an anonymous individual can contact a public figure (via DM – Direct Messaging) and thus has merit on that narrow thread alone.
Instead, I would suggest that any time a Twitter subscriber wished to attest to the authenticity of their account, they might consider something such as making a public statement via that account and then confirming it via an independently verifiable means. I would also suggest that, as a society, we might want to do a better job of promoting scepticism. A good (print) journalist would never release copy with a claim that hadn’t at least two independent sources for verification, yet social media seems to have degenerated to “Think it, Tweet it”, which runs the risk of debasing the medium to a “lowest common denominator”.
No easy answers here, I suspect, though the idea of a “blue tag” – if there were a minimum set of defined and idependently verifiable conditions for award – might be a step in the right direction. If the authenticity checks are more than window dressing, it does at least have the benefit of allowing someone to be identified as authentic and yet remain anonymous.
Agreeing with some above, the ‘blue tick’ can be useful for distinguishing genuine from fake – and that’s just about all it is useful for, in my opinion.
I’ve been on Twitter for far too long (some might say). I wish everybody had your attitude, David. And I don’t have (nor will ever be offered) a blue tick, and I couldn’t care less.
It’s the same about obsessing over followers – Why do some people feel they can only be measured by the number of Twitter followers they have? I only follow people I find interesting, who I think I can engage fruitfully with, or learn something from – and that can range from ‘experts’ to people whose lives are very different from mine. It helps keep my mind and outlook open. If people feel the same about engaging with me, they’re welcome to follow. But that’s it. After all, if you are following (or being followed by) many thousands of users, your timeline must be extraordinarily difficult to wade through – I know mine is, so I actively keep it within manageable bounds.
But, David, let’s face it – Twitter is wonderful in so many ways. It’s the best place for news breaks, a wonderful place to learn things, and a treasure trove of jokes and amusement. And, just sometimes, you meet amazing people there – and even form strong friendships with some.
I’ll ‘blue tick’ Twitter itself for that!
Interesting. As I recall blue ticks came about as a way to avoid impersonation or spoof accounts. How can I tell if the latest crazy post by a world leader was actually from that person or someone who just registered the account @UK_PM or @WhiteHo and picked a credible-looking picture? Given how politics and satire have converged it’s often not obvious if a post was serious or not, so having a tick provides a quick visual assurance that, yes, indeed the message here was actually likely to have been posted by the person who said it was. That’s not the same as saying the message carries greater legitimacy just because the poster of the message is verified.
I wonder if there’s a downside to blue ticks for those who do make controversial tweets? It seems to me that when liable cases get quantified by judges the judge (or perhaps the litigant’s barrister) often makes reference to the number of followers, likes, retweets etc and thus the reach that a message had and therefore its likely impact. If a blue tick adds a public perception of credibility in a libellous statement might you expect the payout to be greater than if exact same message had been written by someone without the magic blue stamp of alleged credibility?
To be fair to Twitter their verification policy was quickly misunderstood as some kind of endorsement of authority. I got mine when someone impersonated me briefly, to demonstrate that I actually was me. I think Twitter would have been a much better place if most users were verified.
I did enjoy how much my blue tick annoyed some folk, though.
Few comments that start “To be fair” get past moderation – as it implies unfairness in the original post!
As it happens, you are wrong: one of the Twitter criteria is notability.
Notability is over-rated
I think I assumed that D,A,G, was a barrister. How wrong can one be?
I happen to be qualified as a barrister too, but I do not practise as one.
Spot on!
Agree absolutely.
And there are a few very suspicious and highly implausible blue ticks out there.
If people cannot be bothered to think for themselves they deserve everything they bring upon themselves.
The letters people remind the technical people that argument from authority IS absurd infinite recursion. The world of authority stands on the shoulders of big blue ticks, and they are supported by little blue ticks all the way down …
To be grey ( I used to be fair, but time’s inevitable march &c … ) the blue tick is probably of more value to Twitter than it is to the accounts that get ” certified “.
I know that I look out for DAG writings wherever they maybe. For me twitter is mostly a signposting system, the real value is to be found in the articles.
Also I find that Blue Tick is associated in my mind with something that might be found on a Kerry Blue or on a breed of cattle, and that association is something I am finding difficult to dislodge.