Schrödinger's blue check: according to Twitter, I may or may not be notable

Twitter is rumored to be relaunching its flopped Twitter Blue subscription tomorrow, which will once again allow people to pay real money to get a blue check next to their name. Hopefully this time it won't lead to mass impersonation and misinformation, but who can tell? Yet already some users are noticing that when they click on an existing blue check (not of the $8 variety), they are served with a pop-up that says, "This is an old verified account. This may be noticeable or no."

It's especially fun when it pops up on accounts like The White House, or even Elon Musk's own Twitter. To be fair, is Elon Musk really remarkable? He didn't even find Tesla.

This new messaging has not yet rolled out to all users, which is normal when a feature is in testing or not fully populated. I don't have it, unlike a colleague who uses Twitter's TestFlight beta app. Meanwhile, Christine told me that on her Android phone, she considers TechCrunch's Twitter to be "outstanding in government, news, entertainment, or other designated category", while my own account "may or may not be notable".

Image credits: screenshot by TechCrunch

Listen. I don't take myself too seriously. As I write this, there are three Pokemon plushies on my desk (one of which can be worn as a hat), and I went to a tabletop role-playing convention this weekend where I had serious conversations with strangers about how one of my hobbies is pretending to be a wizard. I'm also a bit tired because I stayed up too late last night watching a Disney Channel music-themed YouTube documentary/investigation (which is great journalism that I'm jealous I didn't produce and got me definitely makes you think about the failures of historical journalism versus the work of independent creators). What I'm saying is I know I'm Just Some Guy™️. But somehow, being told you "may or may not be notable" is worse than just being told you're not notable. I am in limbo. Which one is it?

Again, my blue tick on Twitter has always been a bit of a fluke, so "may or may not be remarkable" seems really appropriate for where I am at in my career. I only got verified in the first place because my friend worked at BuzzFeed and knew a guy (I was freelance at the time and didn't have those institutional benefits). Now this same friend has temporarily deactivated her account only to try to log back in and find that it no longer exists, but that's another story (...DM me if this has happened to you too). The thing is, the verification system has always been a bit of an arbitrary mystery, especially among journalists - I even know freelancers who deliberately never asked for verification because they feared it would trick people into believing that they are more important than them and thus expose them to more harassment. Unfortunately, I'm too selfish to have that kind of feeling...