Many years ago, I obtained verification for the Twitter account over at my day job. At the time, verification was free, and the blue checkmark reinforced the trustworthiness of our posts.

Under Twitter’s incompetent new management, however, a blue checkmark is no longer a true mark of verification. Rather than requiring that an account prove itself authentic, a checkmark now simply means that the account holder has paid $8 a month for a subscription to “Twitter Blue”. The backlash against this has been strong, and the blue check has become a badge of dishonor.

Unfortunately, against their will, many popular accounts have been comped with free Twitter Blue. The system then makes the erroneous claim that the account has subscribed and been verified:

This has prompted many accounts to defensively tweet a denial of having paid for Twitter, like this one from MIT:

As CBS put it, it’s a debacle. Given all of this, I was recently eagerly awaiting the removal of Rogue Amoeba’s checkmark. The platform can continue its likely shuffle off this mortal coil without receiving any money from us. Fortunately, earlier this month, our checkmark did indeed disappear.

While confirming this, however, I spotted something even more ridiculous. In the unresizeable sidebar found on the Twitter web site, there was a new entry: “Verified Organiza…”

According to the marketing copy, “Verified Organizations is for organizations of all types–businesses, non-profits, and government institutions–to manage their verification, affiliate and verify any related account, and unlock new features”. It seems to basically be Twitter Blue for businesses, and the asking price is $1,000 a month. That’s rather steep.

While staring at this, I found myself tickled. Twitter is attempting to sell companies on a very low-value $12,000-a-year subscription, and they couldn’t even make the full name of this product display untruncated. That is rich.