On Twitter, who needs a tick when you can have a rat?

Elon Musk wants Twitter users to pay to be verified. An artist offers a tongue-in-cheek alternative.

Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, wants $8. After buying Twitter in a $44 billion deal last week, it now wants users to pay if they want their account to sport the platform's blue tick. (Currently, the check mark indicates a verified account.) Many currently verified users met the development with a laugh. Web comic artist Alex Cohen thinks a rat emoji makes a good free alternative.

In a tweet on Tuesday, Mr. Musk derided this which he called Twitter's current lords-and-peasants system for knowing who does or doesn't have a blue tick. Twitter Blue, he added, would offer benefits such as limited ads, the ability to bypass some publisher paywalls, and "priority in replies, mentions, and search, which is critical to defeating the spam/scams". The blue tick would come with the membership. (There is some debate over whether the Twitter check mark is blue or white among some Twitter users, since the check mark itself is, technically, usually white.) “Power to the people! Blue for $8/month,” he wrote.

In response, Mr. Cohen, a 26-year-old political science graduate student at the University from California to Davis, tweeted his idea for an alternative to paying for Twitter verification. "Why would I pay $8 for a blue check if I could put a rat next to my name for free??? I'm calling on everyone to join me in becoming #RatVerified," Mr. Cohen wrote. Tuesday. He added a rat emoji to his display name on Twitter and encouraged others to do the same. The tweet has since been liked 138,000 times and counted, and retweeted over 17,000 times.

"I'm not a big fan of Elon Musk and I don't think it's good that someone can buy one of the most important websites at political and journalistic purposes and then modify it and make it work completely differently without oversight,” Cohen said in a phone interview on Friday.

The Twitter verification was originally rolled out to help prevent spoofing on the platform. He debuted in 2009, inspired by someone impersonating Shaquille O'Neal. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Twitter account was the first to receive the accolade.

The check mark has since become a somewhat contentious symbol. For public figures, including celebrities and journalists, it's a way to confirm that users are who they say they are. But for other users, the tick has become a status symbol, unjustly reserved for a select group. It's a sentiment that Mr. Musk, with his feudal metaphor, seems to share. (Full disclosure: I have a check mark, obtained years ago by an employer. Is it stupid? Yes. Does it help me do my job more efficiently? Yes, too.)

Twitter announced it was suspending further verifications in 2017 after verifying Jason Kessler, a well-known white supremacist who used the platform to organize the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville , Virginia. The company quietly continued to verify accounts and eventually reintroduced a new verification system in 2021.

Since the purchase became official, Mr. Musk has brought a number of changes. He fired senior executives and initiated company-wide layoffs, announced he was creating a