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X revokes paid blue check from United Auto Workers after strike called
(arstechnica.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This whole incident probably took place from automation. As others have stated they changed the profile photo and the system needs verification. The software probably has a hash value for the photo and when they changed the photo the hash value changed triggering the chain of events. You guys are really hung up on hating him but he probably had nothing to do with it other than the initial design verification.
Not everyone is paying for the blue checkmark as far as i know
But in this case, it was a paid blue checkmark.
Hash value? Twitter hosts their account, they literally have to ask Twitter to change the pic.
There's several ways this could be tracked, but if they claimed somewhere they were hashing values and that triggered it, something very fishy is going on.
Like the only way that could happen is if they changed the file hosted at a certain exact URL (weird, especially for an auto workers union), and despite hosting the pics themselves, Twitter added a periodic check for this edge case. But also flagged that as more suspicious than updating it normally
And instead of keeping the cached version until the new one is reviewed, they changed it but flagged the account. Seeing as they basically pioneered sharding, I find this whole situation pretty coincidental
Usually I'd assume incompetence introduced during the imposter checkmark fiasco after they lost all their best engineers, but Musk has shown himself very willing to put his fingers on the scale...