When Twitter Blue came, everyone thought that they would become a celebrity overnight. Unfortunately, while it's easy to get a legacy blue checkmark on your profile, it also comes with a risk of getting impersonated by a suspicious person.
There are times when your feed is flooded with posts from public figures even when you don't follow them. There might be a reason why this exclusive list of Twitter VIP accounts is always on the front page of your timeline.
Is Twitter Prioritizing 35 VIP Accounts?
According to a report by Platformer, Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced last week that the blue check mark will be available to subscribers alone who are willing to pay a monthly fee of $8. This way, the platform can avoid the spread of AI chatbots which are the culprits behind misinformation.
While this is good news for verified users, not everyone is treated equally on the microblogging site, as Musk told critic William Shatner.
"There shouldn't be a different standard for celebrities imo," the tech boss responded.
Platformer says that Twitter is "secretly" prioritizing a special list of 35 VIP accounts that are always ahead of other users and pages.
The outlet only listed a few of them due to the sensitivity of the documents. The information was obtained through anonymous sources.
Since the list might change over time, the site prefers not to share the entirety of the list which contains the most popular personalities on the planet. Some of them are written below:
- LeBron James (NBA star and Los Angeles Lakers forward)
- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes (US representative)
- Ben Shapiro (Founder of Daily Wire)
- Joe Biden (US President)
- Mr. Beast (YouTube content creator and philanthropist)
- @catturd2 (Conservative shitposter)
- @dieworkwriter (Menswear writer)
- @dril (Twitter shitposter)
- Elon Musk
Gizmodo reached out to Twitter to ask how it arrived on the prestigious list. The platform only replied with an emoji of poop.
Related Article: Twitter CEO Elon Musk Confirms 'For You' Page Will Only Display Tweets of Verified Users
Twitter Boosting Elon Musk's Tweets
As Gizmodo writes in its latest report, the VIP list of Twitter users who are always enjoying the limelight was made for engagement monitoring.
There came a time when Musk noticed that the engagement trends on Twitter have been declining back in December. As a result, a company engineer came up with the idea of crafting some VIPs to assess the website traffic on the site.
Unfortunately, the CEO did not like what he witnessed. The disappointing result pushed Musk to self-boost his posts over everyone else's tweets. Apparently, this has sparked some concerns among content creators who desperately want to lure more followers to their pages.
While it did not come as a surprise to every Twitter user, it only goes to show that Musk won't stop changing the platform until he wishes to do so. It could be his way of fixing a problem that is not broken in the first place.