“Twitter’s Blue Tick Controversy: Alanis Morissette Would Sing About It”

It’s been 27 years since Alanis Morissette delighted us with the language-playful song “Ironic”, for which we’ve always come up with new lyrics since then.

She sings about those little moments that turn out differently than expected. Rain on the wedding day, traffic jams when you’re late anyway, a free ride when you’ve already paid. Or, particularly aptly, therefore in the original: “It’s like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife.”

Last weekend and Elon Musk gave us a new line for the song. The first thing that occurred to the Twitter boss was that in the future you should be paying for “Twitter Blue”, the little verification tick behind the name. This is problematic because every fun account can buy its identity in this way.

If you pay eight dollars a month, you automatically get a tick, and your name is no longer checked. Many users have already turned their backs on the network for this reason. The surprise came at the weekend: Twitter now simply gives some profiles a “blue tick”, as it is called in English.

It doesn’t matter whether they paid eight dollars for it or not, whether they are celebrities or not. Who else should know? Alanis Morissette would have sung: “It’s a blue tick on twitter, when you already left the network.” (awa)

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