Hey folks, Pratham here.
Welcome back to Paradox Weekly, a Masters' Union newsletter, where we break down the ideas, trends, and contradictions shaping business today.
Open X and look at the replies under any big account, almost every one has a blue tick next to it.
A few years ago a blue tick meant to show a real person Twitter had checked and approved of.
Today it mostly means the account paid 8 dollars, so it tells me nothing about which of them I should believe.
That means that there is nothing really stopping someone from spinning up a "Masters' Union" account, buying the exact blue tick we would carry, and messaging our students as if it were us.
And the badge would not be able to catch that it’s an impersonation, even though that is exactly the reason the badge was supposed to exist.
In December, the European Commission ruled that X's blue checkmark "deceives users" and fined the company 120 million euros, because anyone can buy "verified" status without X ever checking who they are.
Then, on that same help page, it told users that "it's business as usual."
Instead of changing the way ‘verification’ works, they swapped one word to keep the regulator happy.
Today's paradox: the blue tick is the one thing you can buy to look more trustworthy, and buying it is the exact thing that should make people trust you less.
In India no regulator has touched it, so the tick on your account, and on your customers' accounts, still says "verified" with the same hole sitting under it.
The tick was born in 2009, after baseball manager Tony La Russa sued Twitter over an account pretending to be him.
The deal was simple: somebody at Twitter checked, and this account is who it claims to be.
For thirteen years the rule that gave the badge its value was that money could not buy it, that was the whole product.
An account calling itself Eli Lilly and Company, paid up like everyone else, posted that insulin was now free.
The real Eli Lilly had to apologise for a sentence it never wrote and pull its ads, and for a short while billions in market value came off its stock (around 6% to be exact).
The badge built to catch the fake is the reason the fake got believed.
This is not one man's mistake.
Look at Meta, where most Indian businesses run their ads.
In the first three months of 2026, one investigation traced 67,000 fraudulent ads on Facebook and Instagram, in Europe alone, to 170 blue-check accounts, most of them real profiles that had been hijacked or were impersonating athletes and actors.
Meta got paid twice, once for the scam ads and once for the verification that made those accounts look real.
The simple learning is that if you put a price on a trust signal and it stops being a signal.
The thing he replaced was no golden standard.
For most of its life Twitter alone decided who counted as "notable," it turned down requests from the public, and the rules lived in a box nobody outside the company could see.
In 2017 it gave a checkmark to the man who organised the deadly Charlottesville rally, then froze the whole program after the backlash and admitted it had "created this confusion" about what the badge meant.
Musk called that system "corrupt and nonsensical," and on that point he was right.
But tearing down a broken gate is not the same as building a better one.
Plenty of sensible people think Brussels overreached, and they have a point.
The 120 million euro fine is the first one ever issued under Europe's Digital Services Act, the charge is "deceptive design," and the same law lets the EU fine a company up to 6% of its global revenue.
That is a lot of power aimed at a checkmark.
JD Vance called it an attack on free speech, and the FCC chair called it Europe punishing an American company for winning.
But one fact settles it.
The same day, TikTok faced its own transparency case under the law, agreed to fix it, and paid nothing.
X offered no fix and chose the fine to pay 120 million euros because it’s nothing compared to what the badge earns.
A badge called deceptive, a fine, nervous advertisers.
You would expect people to leave but that didn’t happen.
X is still one of the most used platforms on earth, advertisers who walked out have come back, and in 2025 its ad revenue grew for the first time since Musk took over.
Plus they’re usage is only increasing:
People kept paying for the badge a regulator had just called a lie.
Most people read that as Musk getting away with it but I think they are missing the point.
Trust and attention are two different products, and Musk only sold off the trust.
The fights, the impersonations, the doubt over who is real, that is attention, and attention is what X sells to advertisers.
Trust is worth something for one reason, that you cannot buy it.
The moment you can, everyone can see it is worth nothing.
Musk inherited thirteen years of public belief he had no hand in building, charged 8 dollars to let anyone borrow it, and spent down the one asset on the balance sheet that money cannot rebuild.
Europe forced him to drop the word "verified." India has not, so here the tick still says verified while promising only that a payment went through.
We spent thirteen years building a shortcut for "this account is real," and we are back where we started, ignoring the tick and trying to ensure the person is who they claim to be.
Hit reply and be honest with me: have you ever paid for a blue tick, or wanted to? If so, why?
I read every email.
Until next week,
Pratham