The New York Times Is Not Ceding Verification to Musk

The daily newspaper has no intention of paying for the blue check mark, Twitter’s “passport to verification.” And Twitter’s CEO is on the attack.

Winston Churchill never said it, but it would not be too much of a stretch to affirm his thinking and say that the media is like democracy — it is the worst system except for all the others. Furthermore, democracy and the media are like DNA’s double helix: It is not possible to sequence the human genome by pulling out a single helix. It is for this reason that the (one-way) verbal confrontation between Twitter’s CEO Elon Musk and The New York Times hits the social platform’s main nerve , i.e., its content, and therefore, its very social and democratic value. “[T]heir feed is the Twitter equivalent of diarrhea. It’s unreadable,” Musk wrote. This all occurred after The New York Times declined to pay for the blue check mark that shows an official, verified account.

It’s a clear message — trustworthiness is not a commodity on Musk’s lemonade stand. It’s a complicated subject. If Twitter starts conflating verification of content with the willingness to pay to have this “passport of credibility,” it runs the risk of ending up as a recycling algorithm or a recycling mill. Without what Musk defines as “diarrhea” — that is, the professional media with all its Churchillian defects — the result would be an infinite reposting of kitten photos; useless posts that are, at best, used and abused, at worst, false or misleading; old newspaper cuttings; Wikipedia pages that crumble away between the right to be forgotten and the lack of sources. Considering that a producer of plausible, but not always verifiable, content has just been added to the mix in the guise of artificial intelligence, the situation is not promising. As with currency in the Middle Ages, bad content drives out the good. In Byung-Chul Han’s world of “non-things,”* we are like hunter-gatherers of information and data after having been hunters for food. On the other hand, media is like food: We quickly became accustomed to industrial added sugar and fast food — and have realized too late that they are bad for us.

*Translator’s Note: Byung-Chul Han is a South Korean-born German philosopher and cultural theorist who is the author of the book, “Non-Things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld” [https://www.internimagazine.com/features/the-non-things-of-by-chul-han/][Proofer: The translation of the title didn’t match the translator’s source, but matched Amazon’s: Amazon.com : byung-chul han books]