The latest twist on the Elon Musk-led X platform, formerly known as Twitter, is that users can now block unverified accounts to respond to your posts.
This change comes about 11 months after Musk launched paid verification for Twitter Blue, assigning blue checkmark labels to people willing to pay $7.99 a month. It also means it could be harder for those who don’t pay for the service (with the exception of accounts forced to move to verified status) to refute misinformation, which researchers say has continued to rise.
There is an argument that limiting responses to accounts verified by payment, phone number, or even government ID could reduce harassment, trolling, and misinformation.
However, that argument is quickly undone, whether by the continued presence of bots with verified labels or a quick look at the current state of the platform. Since X already prioritizes responses from verified accounts, it’s easy to evaluate the quality of threads populated by paid posters with verification marks. A reply to
