How Twitter Blue’s Paid Verification Promotes Disinformation: Observations and Examples

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Since the arrival of Elon Musk, there have been many changes on Twitter that favor the disinformation on the platform. Since April 20, the accounts They no longer have the blue verification tick they had for having achieved it after the authentication and relevance process; Now the users who have the badge are because they have paid for the Twitter Blue service. This promotes misinformation, mainly for two reasons: on the one hand, paid verification, which costs only between 8 and 11 euros per monthyou can give a false sense of legitimacy to accounts and messages that are not authentic, and on the other hand, user comments with this blue tick have more visibilityfor example appearing first among the responses to another tweet. Although this could happen before, now the misinformers take advantage of this mechanism to spread false information.

since the platform announced changes to the social network respect to the original Twitter insignia, since Maldita.es We have detected different users who they spread misinformation and that they have paid verification. We have also found examples in which denial responses from users with verification obtained through Twitter Blue have priority about others who do not pay for this service.

Replies and content from Twitter Blue users have priority

With Twitter Blue they have incorporated changes to the priority order of replies to tweets. The “priority position in talks” is included within one of the many “benefits” offered by the Twitter Blue service -and which are explained in the Twitter official site– for which there is a “light preference to responses from verified Twitter Blue accounts with respect to the other answers.

In addition, Twitter explains that they are being tested “different levels of priority of the content of Twitter Blue subscribers in relation to the other factors that we take into account for the positioning of the conversations”. On April 25 Elon Musk, the CEO of the company, tweeted that “now verified accounts are prioritized”.

This means that verified accounts -which since April 20 can only be maintained by paying with Twitter Blue- have priority both in disseminating their content and in responding to other tweetsso in cases where a user promotes misinformation in a response, This is positioned better than others from users who do not have verificationit is included about users who notice that content is false or misleading.

Climate deniers are leveraging Twitter Blue to spread misinformation

From Maldita.es We have detected several cases in which, in the face of different tweets from scientists warning about global warming and rising global temperature without precedents, Twitter has prioritized denier responses on climate change.

It’s tweeted by Ed Hawkins, science journalist for the National Center for Atmospheric Sciences from the UK, with graphics showing climate change, along with the caption “Yes, the climate has always changed. But the speed of recent change is unprecedented”, is an example of this. He researcher has reflected in a tweet on the subject and added: “More importantly, we understand why. The burning of fossil fuels and the deforestation it adds carbon dioxide to the atmosphere which warms the planet. simple physics. Understood for more than a century.

In the post, all first answers They are from users who have the blue tick of Twitter Blue -as we have indicated, today is the only way-, y many of them have responded with climate change denier content. For example, this user responded with a graph that claims to show that global temperature rise is “not a current thing,” but since Maldita.es We have already alerted of that content: The graph does not disprove global warming because it reflects only the temperature at one point in Greenland and, ending in 1885, does not include the current climate crisis sparked by the Industrial Revolution, which began precisely at that time.

“CO2 It’s not a problem, you’re all lying and you know it.” “Lies lies lies. There have been no ice caps for much of Earth’s history. It is a cycle, like everything else; known for much more than centuries. “…the speed of recent change is unprecedented…IT’S NOT TRUE!” others respond (1 y 2). These responses are also misleading. There is a large scientific consensus that global warming is human caused and what is happening now has no precedent in the history of our society. The greenhouse effect is intensifying because there are more of the gases that cause it circulating in the atmosphere, as we have already explained. As the last few decades have progressed, the amount of CO2 coming from fossil sources has been increasing, becoming the main source of this gas currently in the atmosphere, something that was not the case in pre-industrial times, so it is not a ‘cycle’, as the tweets say.

Another case has been with a publication by Colin McCarthy, an expert in atmospheric sciences and creator of the “My Radar” application, who has tweeted a graph to show that “ocean temperatures they have been at all-time record warm levels for 42 consecutive days”, something that, according to the expert, “is unprecedented in the modern history of the Earth”.

But in front of this tweet too the first responses are from Twitter Blue users and deniers. “All I know is that the water is unusually cold in California right now,” says the first comment, which negates McCarthy’s argument. This is super! Can I go swimming in winter without being cold?” answered another jokingly.

As we have explained to you, there are what are called marine heat waves whose frequency has doubled and have become more durable, intense and extensive due to climate change in recent years, as explained by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)the most important group of scientists worldwide on climate change.

Besides, These tweets exaggerate situations to deny climate change, since this phenomenon does not imply that temperatures are increasing linearly and that the water will never be cold again.. What it means is that there is a general upward trend in temperatures, making it increasingly likely that more frequent and intense sea waves will occur.

It is another Peter Gleick tweetan American scientist, also shows priority responses with denial responses. after tweeting a blog post about sea level rise, some users indicated that it was a false content. some of the comments indicate: “Crap! I have been going to the same place in Spain for almost 50 years, the same now as then!

There are also disinformative tweets that have priority in their responses if they pay Twitter Blue

In addition to climate deniers, there are also other types of cases where tweets that spread hoaxes or misinformation have priority responses, that they are above other users who are not verified and who could deny the hoax.

“Oh look, the CIA admits that they are altering weather patterns through chemtrails. It’s like any other ‘conspiracy theory’: it’s actually true.” points to a tweet along with a video of former CIA director John Brennan. But US fact-checkers Politifact y USA Today They denied the video: Brennan did not say that the government is spraying toxic chemicals into the air. The former CIA director spoke in 2016 at the Council on Foreign Relations about the injection of stratospheric aerosols, a proposed method of geoengineering that he claims could mitigate the effects of global warming. It involves spraying particles, such as sulfur dioxide, into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight. The technology is not currently in use.

You can also find other cases where the user is attacked in the comments, like this former NASA astronaut, Mark Kelly, who has tweeted in the wake of Earth Day and has received negative comments.

The order of priority in the responses is not the only change that the social network has incorporated with Twitter Blue and that cause misinformation. Another consequence that these changes can generate is the spoofingwhich has affected both emergency services, media and officials. There have also been cases of verified Hitler exaltation accounts subscribed to Twitter Blue.