23 Things Less Embarrassing Than Having A Blue Checkmark On Twitter Now

Blue checkmarks used to be cool. Back in the day, you could get one for being famous, for having a lot of followers for unclear reasons, or for going viral for taking a weird photo of a brick of cheese that looked like Paul Giamatti (I assume this would qualify someone). Sometimes, if you were a journalist or editor, your news organization would have you verified so users knew you were a real New York Times reporter and not some kind of rip-off Paul Krugman. The symbol was elite.

Then, Elon Musk came along, and lo and behold, blue checkmarks are now humiliating. Under Musk’s watch, users were stripped of their verifications — the ones they earned for weird cheese pics — unless they paid $8 per month. Now, anyone can pony up and look “famous.”

A blue checkmark is visual proof that you’re giving Twitter money. Which wouldn’t be so bad, except that its CEO spread misinformation about COVID; reopened a Tesla factory in 2020 in defiance of public health orders, leading to 450 cases; tweeted “pronouns suck” (his estranged daughter is trans); compared Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Adolf Hitler; regularly makes sexist jokes; promotes Dogecoin; and broke a social network that once provided an outlet for hundreds of millions of users. He has a net worth of $163 billion; he doesn’t need more money.

But Musk has gone one step further than making the status symbol humiliating. He’s also, in some cases, made them compulsory for users with over 1 million followers, and people who piss him off. Celebrities have complained. He’s one of few men with the capacity to embarrass someone by giving them something for free. To understand how humiliating it is to have a blue checkmark now, I’ve created a list of things that would be less embarrassing to do on Twitter:

1. Post nudes.
2. Beg desperately for a Bluesky invite. An invite-only social network that looks exactly like Twitter and calls its posts “skeets”? It’s fine to be on it, but don’t put in effort toward being on it. At least, not publicly.
3. Put the words “live, laugh, love” in your Twitter bio.
4. Publicly discuss your relationship drama.
5. Accidentally like your ex’s tweet from 2015.
6. Intentionally like your ex’s tweet from 2015.
7. Use Twitter polls to decide how often to floss.
8. Beg your Twitter followers to follow you to Bluesky.
9. Dox yourself by accident because you thought it would be funny to post your bad driver’s license photo, and then you ended up posting the whole license.
10. Write honestly about the benefits of the Keto diet.
11. Reply to every single one of Zach Braff’s tweets.
12. Tweet about how Bluesky is so, so, so, much better than Twitter, even though it’s exactly the same, and you post the exact same content on both.
13. Post a Kickstarter link for your own Botox, and then fail to raise any money, but get Botox anyway and pretend it was crowdfunded.
14. Repost each of your Bluesky “skeets” as tweets, and remind your Twitter users to follow you there, even though none of them are on it yet.
15. Follow Marjorie Taylor-Greene.
16. DM Nickelback to tell them you like their music.
17. Post your entire search history.
18. Admit you’ve never voted.
19. Earnestly review your favorite self-help book.
20. Really, do anything earnest.
21. Post every day about how your dog is the cutest dog in the entire world, when it’s really only like 50% percentile cute, for a dog.
22. Do the same thing for a cat. Actually, that’s even worse.
23. Delete your Twitter. Actually, that’s not embarrassing at all... especially not now that you have Bluesky.