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today we're gonna take a break from YouTube and set our sights on twitter.com the website everyone seems to know about but no one really uses and who can really blame them it's not a place for normal people you see normal people are content with broadcasting their opinions to their local community of friends and family on Twitter you believe your opinions are important enough to share with the whole world of course it's no surprise that this premise attracts a special kind of person you almost have to have some sort of mental disorder they even tolerate this place narcissism sociopaths the downward spiral paranoia Twitter is basically just a giant mental institution preventing these people from investing the rest of the web Twitter's user bases that dude you knew in high school who would smugly correct you about everything smug is actually one of the only three emotions you're allowed to feel on Twitter the others being passive-aggressive and it's an environment where you can slip up just once even in an honest mistake from years ago and you'll get tarred and feathered by a mob of anime profile pics then beheaded by k-pop stands and taxidermist by militant political activists if Instagram is the blissful blue pill of ignorance Twitter is like sticking a razor blade up your sinuses Twitter is what would happen if you took YouTube's comment section and made that the entire website I apologize for the long-winded diatribe but I really have to hammer in the point of how little value Twitter has to its users on Twitter you have nothing okay but everything that glues youtubers get ad revenue Instagram models can work their way up to make sponsored posts even on reddit you can at least get gold by being the biggest suck-up imaginable there is no monetary incentive to use Twitter by the time you get big enough to make sponsored tweets you're almost certainly at a status where you can make money in spite of yourself if you're beneath this level then good luck getting anything out of Twitter well that's not exactly true there are at least a few things you can get from Twitter you can get cancelled you can get suspended for no reason realistically the only redeeming quality of Twitter's networking as a content creator but if you're just a regular user I have no idea how you tolerate this place except there is one other incentive to use Twitter with no money to be made the theoretical end game of Twitter's to get one of these Twitter's verification badge the loan token of achievement in a cesspool of sin and misery so how do you get it well step 1 be a reporter corporation or elite public figure if you're not any of these things then just give up one day I got this joking reply to one of my tweets but it raises a very valid question why is it so much harder to get verified on Twitter than anywhere else grande 1.2 million Twitter followers not verified critical 5 million YouTube subscribers nearly a million Twitter followers not verified call me Carson over a million Twitter followers all of his posts get over 50,000 likes he trended on Twitter from people wishing him happy birthday not verified you go to the official verification page on Twitter and it's been radio silent for the past two and a half years they keep saying to check back later for the new and improved verification system but later never comes what's going on here pretty much every website has a verification system YouTube Instagram pornhub Edmodo once you accumulate a high enough status something has to prevent people from just impersonating you and damaging your reputation this is the theoretical purpose of a verification system on any website and almost all websites have no issues whatsoever implementing the system in practice last year my friend rusty cage got verified on Instagram while simultaneously being suspended multiple times without any chance for appeal on Twitter it really just goes to show how differently Twitter treats its users than any other site for some reason twitter has taken this simple concept and corrupted it into a confusing and unrecognizable mess how did this happen and what steps can you take to actually get verified on this website well using some of the Twitter connections I've made over the years I'm gonna try my best to answer this question first how did we get here and how has Twitter's verification system changed over time back in 2009 Twitter was becoming a big player in the world of social media on the world wide web with celebrities from across the world flocking to the site to share their lives in 140 characters the problem was some of these accounts claiming to be people of no2 weren't who they said they were rather just imposters when st. louis cardinals manager Tony LaRussa found out someone was impersonating him on the site he went on to sue Twitter for damages not wanting this to happen again the fine people at the Internet start-up devised a verification system that would allow famous users to protect their identity from being stolen by those with nefarious motives in the early days this was made specifically for celebrities musicians athletes and other public figures and a year or so later brands and companies would be added to that list the process to get a blue checkmark seemed to be on a need-to-know basis if you were popular enough to need one you'd know how to get it the at verified account is the public's best glimpse into the system at play as it follows every single person that has been given verified status between 2009 and 2016 the site verified on average 25,000 accounts per year totaling 186 thousand out of 300 million some of these seem more justifiable than others in the summer of 2016 Twitter released a public application for verification this event coincided with the last generation of youtubers to get verified a generation considered by some Twitter users to have set our culture back by a decade sometimes I wish I could go back a decade to a time when Twitter would actually verify youtubers but I guess the next best thing is just asking these guys what the process was like now I don't have contact with Joji or idubbbz and Chad isn't verified so that just leaves max mofo as my only option let's see what he had to say max told me that he didn't quite remember the specific process but he thinks it probably happened as soon as the public application became available the web archive shows that max was verified as of September 2016 so this timing appears to check out what matters here is that the verification process back then was free and easy and the bar for entry was relatively low Twitter's verification system was more equitable than ever before but it would not last long the time has executed for the 66 on November 9th 2017 Twitter announced that they were indefinitely suspending the verification process across the entire site they would go on to strip verification from numerous controversial accounts most notably D verifying prominent white nationalists Richard Spencer while many celebrated the announcement as a justified punishment it didn't really make any sense administratively Twitter's reasoning for D verifying accounts was that an unnamed minority of users began to view the blue checkmark as an endorsement prior to the change I found very little evidence of anyone publicly complaining about this as the nature of verification should be obvious it's a simple demarcation of a public figure if kim jeong-hoon were on twitter should he be verified what about Pablo Escobar or Ted Bundy surely no one at Twitter would endorse any of their actions but as such highly publicized individuals it would be bizarre to imagine that these people wouldn't be verified on any public forum the idea that verifications equal endorsements is incredibly flimsy these two concepts are completely unrelated yet Twitter chose to conflate them based on an unknown number of unspecified users getting confused but let's get more confusing just one year earlier in 2016 Twitter suspended Richard Spencer and then reinstated him with his verification upholding that verification does not equal endorsement today when you look at Twitter's official verification page it specifically states that verification does not equal endorsement and there was an important reason behind this recently president Trump threatened executive action against Twitter that would remove one of its safe harbor provisions I've talked about the type of safe harbor before as it pertains to copyright law and a similar provision since section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which protects sites like Twitter from being held liable for the conduct of their users what's important here is that the exemption only exists if Twitter does not act as a publisher by treating verification as an endorsement Twitter could potentially jeopardize their safe harbor protection by assuming responsibility over user conduct by choosing to curate verification along their own subjective standards Twitter could have been classified as a publisher of any content posted by verified accounts opening themselves up to potentially devastating liabilities now I'm in no way a legal expert so I could be completely wrong here but this is just my best explanation for why Twitter has been so inconsistent with this issue so far it seems that this whole campaign was just a bunch of lip service after 2017 they have made no major effort to de Vera Phi controversial accounts so was this whole exercise just completely pointless for users yes but for Twitter possibly not while Richard Spencer drew in all the attention from the incident nobody realized that this event would mark the end of equitable verification on Twitter entirely not only that but every existing support article about verification was subsequently removed links to these old articles now all redirect to a generic page with barely any information to this day public verification on Twitter remains indefinitely suspended so what led Twitter to quietly make such a drastic change to find out why we have to follow the money in 2015 Twitter's active user base plateaued the site was no longer growing just one year afterwards Twitter stock price had fallen by 70 percent the companies then CEO Dick Costolo was pressured to step down and was replaced by current Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey for most of 2017 the stock price remains stagnant while the rest of the market surged twitter was in bad shape and investors were rapidly losing confidence numerous financial publications listed jack dorsey among the worst ceos in America starting November 9th Twitter suspended verification and then went on to post its first profitable quarter in company history 2018 saw Twitter's revenue increased by nearly 25 percent causing the stock price to effectively double it was at this point that the worthless blue checkmark became a commodity but how do you convert a blue badge into green paper to find out we have to cross over to the corporate side of Twitter [Music] ah brand Twitter there's nothing else really like it long ago pretty much every brand account on Twitter only existed to spam hashtags and submissively apologized to disgruntled customers then everything changed when Wendy's attacked all of a sudden every brand you can imagine was jockeying to see who can make the most viral tweet this quickly escalated to empathetic Moonpie consoling depressed Sunny D you're looking at the future of marketing here people basically every brand who was any brand had to develop a sassy or relatable persona and playfully banter with each other on Twitter it's so convincing they act just like people they show emotions just like people but don't be fooled much like in general society these brands are among the most powerful members of Twitter and there's a good reason for that as much as Twitter's leadership would like you to forget Twitter is a for-profit business first and a public forum second like many sites Twitter earns its revenue from advertising brands provide the funding that Twitter needs to survive as a business so it should be no surprise why brands tend to receive the most preferential treatment brand accounts have the easiest path to verification it's surprising to find one without a checkmark you'd think they get it automatically but it's actually not that simple while researching this video I actually had to enter forbidden territory by consulting the wisdom of a real-life brand thankfully stay calm had followed me some time ago so I reached out to them for comment what they told me may shock you it turns out that after Twitter suspended verification the change was severe enough to affect some brands stay calm actually had to create their own guerrilla campaign in order to draw the attention of the right people according to them Twitter prioritizes verifying companies that spend the most advertising money on the site this key piece of information may explain why Twitter verification has seemed so inaccessible over the past few years the check mark itself doesn't generate revenue but it rewards companies who do keeping the check mark accessible would devalue its purpose as an incentive for ad spending this could also explain why so many accounts in the news industry are verified news media is one of the only industries to heavily rely on Twitter as part of the rat race to get clicks there's no doubt that news articles play a heavy role in Twitter's information economy featured articles will drive the most traffic to their native sites and one has to wonder how much some of these media outlets spend to put themselves in that position now I'm not saying that the check mark is the sole reason for Twitter's boom in revenue but it's almost certainly symptomatic of the site's more brand happy business model as of late and based on its success so far verification may never return to how it once was welcome to the age of the blue filter we're independent creators without industry backing may be stuck without a checkmark forever in this age only a few creators have managed to buck the trend and get verified so I reached out to as many as I could and asked them how they did it Cabos is a youtuber you wouldn't expect to be verified on Twitter given the far more massive channels who still remain unverified so I asked him how he did it and this is what he had to say Cabos is part of the YouTube network BB TV sometime in 2019 he put in a request to the network to get him verified on Twitter three months later the network succeeded so it appears that joining a YouTube network could help you get verified however most youtubers would generally not recommend joining a YouTube network given how many of them take a decent cut of your pay to do basically nothing occasionally you'll get the rare goodie like the coveted blue checkmark but other than that networks tend to carry a great risk for creators with little benefit if you have to resort to a management company you may just want to pump and dump them like too mad you know the vibes role is truly I signed with some management company and they submitted me to some guy this guy named Zach Missoula this guy's the guy whose verify his people lot of gaming guys and I mean I had no idea was coming he just let me know like at one point like you know I also submit you for very good I was like oh wait really yeah they replied they said yeah it should be done by the way what really ok so then after a little while it happened I just got very play [Music] earlier this year alpha rats successfully became one of the only accounts in history to get verified with an anim profile picture I saw some rumors that he may have encouraged his fans to impersonate him so he could force Twitter to verify him this same impersonation exploit is suggested in a video by tech boomers but doesn't appear to have worked on their own account starting a mass impersonation campaign seems like a one-way ticket to getting banned so I asked alpha rat if these rumors were true it turns out he actually got verified with help from eSports organization panda global this explains how so many eSports competitors seem to get verified so easily unlike a YouTube network eSports organizations pay you to help manage your profile but also unlike a YouTube network you can't just sign up for faze clan or Team Liquid these organizations only tend to sponsor the most elite eSports players not exactly a practical option for content creators just looking to get verified on Twitter if you're looking for the most direct path to verification you may have to follow in the footsteps of kao belly studios recently he shared this post detailing the process of how he got verified so I asked him to elaborate on how the system works basically he hired a specialized service to have Twitter review his account for verification the service ran through a site called famous influencer calm and as part of the process they groomed his profile for success giving him the criteria that Twitter currently requires for verification some of the requirements are just cosmetic such as displaying your real name and face on your profile personally I found this somewhat counterintuitive as your followers should be used to your specific branding and persona and disrupting that is definitely going to hurt your engagement I mean should we expect rappers to display their real names before verifying their profiles it seems kind of dumb to me this place isn't exactly LinkedIn here's the real kicker though the most important factor in Twitter's new standards for verification is whether or not you've been featured in mainstream news articles now personally I've actually been cited and interviewed for quite a few online articles one time I even made the cover of insider so where's my badge well showing up in articles only takes you so far to actually get verified you need to initiate a manual review by a contact at Twitter Concord what are you talking about the enigmatic Twitter contact is the final boss of verification they are people speculated to work within Twitter's communications department who serve as the ultimate gatekeepers of the blue checkmark you could meet all the criteria for verification but without access to a contact the blue checkmark will forever remain out of reach this is why someone like nerd city who has been featured in dozens of articles still remains unverified and as it turns out the lion's share of Twitter contacts are held by big companies political institutions and news publications if multimillion-dollar brands like steak hum have trouble getting in touch with one then what chance do independent creators have PR agencies like famous influencer will sell you the opportunity to reach a contact for the low low price of five thousand pounds and that's if you already have the mainstream news coverage famous influencer also has a network of mainstream press writers at their disposal to totally manufacture you into a media darling of course at the additional cost of thousands more over just a few years Twitter has managed to take a free feature and stick it behind what is essentially a pay well of thousands of dollars and they have deliberately tried to restrict access to any information about how the verification process even works twitter now resembles a pay2win game and i'm not really sure i want to play anymore this site has become a permanent reminder to me that as bad as YouTube's leadership is it can still get worse Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey always boasts about wanting to promote healthy conversation usually while introducing features that literally restrict conversation our platform promotes speech unless people violate our rules you listen to Twitter's officials talk about this site like they're building some sort of utopia of erudite public discourse have you seen the people on this site it's not a vocal minority go click on any trend on the discover page and you'll see enraged psychopaths viciously attacking each other like someone kicked over a hornet's nest it's a site where otherwise calm people go to have an emotional meltdown basically if you're looking for healthy discussion you've come to the wrong place what do you think this is that it was they were angry the world is an angry place but you know what certainly doesn't help the harmonious temperament of the site creating an arbitrary system to segregate the protected elites from the worthless plebs Twitter has corrupted the verification system to such an extent where lots of people seem to have more respect for non verified people than verified people the phrase blue checkmark has quite literally become a pejorative term against obnoxious verified accounts but it's hard to blame the blue checkmarks for acting like any other user a few months ago critical made a point about Twitch's inconsistent enforcement of their Community Guidelines specifically how certain female streamers seemed immune from punishment that's pretty much like the twitch mod team here just operating in secrecy which is the worst way of doing things with no transparency it just leads to a lot of confusion and a lot of bad things even for the streamers that they seem to want to protect and I don't even know if that's the right word for it I don't even know if they're making a conscious decision to protect streamers but just this weird favoritism they seem to play in this bias leads to these conspiracy theories where you know all women are invincible on Twitch because they're giving nude photos to the mod team for special treatment he said that by arbitrarily protecting female streamers twitch it's community to unfairly target and resent them similarly I feel that Twitter's inconsistent verification system has caused people to distrust verified accounts I have no doubt in my mind that the commodification of the blue checkmark has contributed to the public's growing resentment of journalists people new to the site have to wonder why a random reporter with 5,000 followers is verified but their favorite youtuber with 500,000 followers isn't this distinction can only create suspicion and discontent and it makes the site look incredibly out of touch with its users perhaps the gatekeeping wouldn't be as much of an issue of Twitter actually applied consistently strict standards to everyone but when journalists get to act as unprofessionally as anyone else while flexing their I'm better than you badge the whole thing reeks of systematic favoritism oh my gosh is that an article you're a journalist that's so great here why don't you take about ten of these given to all your friends people may bash the blue checkmarks but Twitter itself is to blame for administering such a skewed system at least YouTube despite all of its problems has managed to create and maintain an equitable verification system there is no such stigma around grey check marks on YouTube but still in classic YouTube fashion they had to at least try and ruin it remember last year when for absolutely no reason YouTube tried to overhaul the verification system in a thinly veiled attempt to elevate corporate accounts remember how universally unpopular it was and how everyone flipped out to such an extent that YouTube backed out after 24 hours and never brought it up again well guess what fellas that garbage system proposed by YouTube is how Twitter's verification system works right now and unlike YouTube Twitter shows no signs of remorse about it they openly mock how they deliberately neglect their users it's all just a big joke to them you know maybe more people would actually use this site if the management didn't treat the average user with utter contempt and it's not just the verification system that reflects this recently twitter user lane as chris documented compelling evidence of a belligerent account abusing an Insider connection at twitter support tube an innocent users without any recourse for appeal this is in addition to a never-ending string of DMCA take downs in which Twitter allows trolls to submit unlimited false copyright claims with no proof whatsoever this is a site where you can literally post gore and pornography but god forbid you depict cheese at hitting the World Trade Center our platform promotes speech unless people violate our rules Twitter wants to be seen as a utopia so why does using this site feel like I'm in Soviet Russia the site is in general disrepair people constantly disappear without warning and the corrupt delusional leadership would rather focus on a petty pissing contest with America's president than actually responding to the needs of its users I'm sorry but when state um is a better source of information than your own help page then maybe your site is a bit of a transparency issue how does one acquire the illustrious check mark on Twitter there's a guy named Kevin he's the verification God so just go to him and he'll get you sorted actually as I was making this video it's been rumored that Twitter has plans to finally roll out a new public application for verification I guess it took them two and a half years to fix something that wasn't even broken in the first place who knows maybe we'll be able to trim videos again before the end of the century it just goes to show that the site is so little to offer that they stroked themselves off for adding features that already existed should have always existed and only don't exist because of their own incompetence I Oh Twitter can we get that edit button in 2020 the answer is No so in conclusion Twitter is a terrible platform run by terrible people we're terrible users have terrible discussions about terrible issues and for some reason this site attracts a bunch of youtubers can't imagine why but at least it's good for networking because as youtubers we know that Twitter will hold off on verifying us for as long as they possibly can almost none of the information I learned in this video came from Twitter itself it was only made possible through the assortment of connections I've made over the years so despite being a general bane on society Twitter's good for at least one thing as for the blue checkmark I don't even really want it anymore several thousand dollars has a steep price to pay for something that should be free and the whole Machine around it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth for all intents and purposes having the badge doesn't even do much you get to more easily interact with other verified accounts but that's about it none of the people I interviewed saw a huge improvement in their quality of life after being verified and it didn't seem to contribute to any direct financial benefit honestly this whole video just made me sad frustrated and was overall just a big waste of time so really no different than my experience browsing Twitter I'm starting to see why PewDiePie left this place at the end of the day I guess the blue checkmark wound up being the most appropriate symbol of Twitter as a whole you have nothing to gain and everything to lose [Music] and you'll be [Music] [Applause]