Twitter and ticks, payments and people, musk and mechanoids

Elon Musk says Twitter – now known as “X formerly Twitter” to everyone and “TwiX” to me – will implement a “small monthly payment» for users. In a conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he said the strategy represented the only way he could think of “to fight vast armies of robots.” This strategy could end the bot wars raging on Twitter, but it could also end social media platforms as a place for information, entertainment, learning, revelation and debate. Surely there are other options?

Payments

The Twitter Blue payment strategy does not appear to have paid off. There are of course some Twitter Blue followers. And they have some interesting features. Researcher Travis Brown, who tracked these subscribers, say that approximately half of all users subscribed to Twitter Blue have fewer than 1,000 followers. This represents approximately 220,132 paying subscribers. Breaking down the follower count even further, there are 2,270 paid subscribers on Twitter Blue who have zero followers!

Perhaps a better overall strategy could begin by recognizing that the issue of payments for use of services and the issue of use of services by living human beings are actually quite separate issues. Mr. Musk must solve not one problem, but two: payments and personality. Let’s look at them independently and see if there are suitable strategies for dealing with each of them.

Let’s look at payments first. As an enthusiastic user of the service since the early days, and as someone who was once denied a blue tick and who refuses to pay for a blue tick in the end times, I would prefer to move towards a model of subscription. the kind that Professor Scott Galloway has been calling for for some time. As a fairly heavy Twitter user, I think this is probably the way to go. If things are prioritized correctly, most users will pay nothing and users with millions of subscribers will pay a lot, which seems like a pretty reasonable way to organize such things.

What I mean is that Mr. Musk could charge people for access based on the number of followers they have. I can imagine it working on a logarithmic progression, so for people with up to 100 subscribers it’s free to use the service, up to 1,000 subscribers it’s $5 a month, up to 10,000 subscribers is $10 per month, up to 100,000 subscribers. it’s $20 a month, up to 1 million subscribers it’s $100 a month and over a million subscribers costs $1,000 a month or something like that. This would allow for casual engagement as well as “industrial” use by celebrities and brands. This wouldn’t remove bots without followers, but that’s the second problem, personality.

Determining whether a social media profile is a person or a bot is at the heart of X’s problems and it continues to deploy new tactics in this battle. In recent times, a number of profiles subscribed to Twitter Blue have been approved. although they are non-human entities. So now it hopes to resolve “some of the confusion left by its change in identity verification policies” by offering account verification based on government IDs.

I wonder, however, whether social media companies should tackle this problem themselves. If X or Instagram or LinkedIn want to know if I’m a real person or not, they don’t need to establish it themselves because there are already many of them who can testify to my existence. And a pretty obvious place to look for relevant testimonials I would be at my bank. Mike Chambers, who managed a substantial part of the UK’s payments infrastructure as CEO of BACS, recently highlighted that Open Banking offers a potential solution to the general problem of identity verification by taking the due diligence done by banks and making it portable. This is, for example, what Adobe
ADBE
do with UK OneID so that Acrobat Sign customers can include a verified signature from a verified identity in their electronic signature processes.

Open banking would, in many countries, radically change the ability of providers to offer truly seamless integration. How? Well, when I sign up for a social networking site, instead of asking me to figure out which of the nine pictures is a motorcycle (actually, robots can solve these puzzles faster than people can anyway), the site can send me to my bank, where I can be strongly authenticated using the existing infrastructure. The bank can then return a cryptographically tamper-proof token stating “yes, this person is real and one of my customers.”

In other words, they could grant me the verifiable title IS-A-PERSON.

Credentials for Money

It’s not just about social media, it’s about everything. We need to stop requiring personal data to enable transactions and instead require the relevant identifying information necessary to enable the specific interaction. There is a world of difference between me asking for your date of birth and me asking for proof that you are over 21, between me asking for your address and me asking for proof that you reside in the continental United States, between me asking you to find photos of tractors in a confusing collection of blurry photographs and asking me for proof that you are a person.

This last example, proof of personhood, is at the heart of the TwiX debacle. Since there is no IS-A-PERSON ID that TwiX can request, banks cannot charge them for it. But suppose such a title exists? It would then be a win-win for TwiX to pay $2 to obtain these credentials from a bank rather than spending $5 to obtain them themselves.