Not every new blue check on Twitter is a fan of Elon Musk.
As Twitter’s distinctive blue check goes from a badge of legitimacy to a sign that you’re paying the company eight dollars a month, some high-profile users have been campaigning to #BlockTheBlue. In other words, they want to block all users who sign up for Twitter Blue using automated scripts and plugins.
The idea behind this movement is that if someone were to willingly give Twitter a monthly payment in return for a blue check, it would likely fall into line with the so-called “anti-wake” policy that Musk and his inner circle routinely adopt. Alejandra Caraballo, a professor at the Harvard Cyberlaw Clinic, published a letter ban list Blue Verified accounts on Github, while beloved meme account dril took a strong enough stance on #BlockTheBlue and it looks like Elon Musk gave him a blue check to troll.
There are some advantages to this: crypto spam accounts have taken advantage of Twitter Blue to boost their own visibility, while others post vile snippets. But for some online sex creators and sex workers, Twitter Blue is essential to staying on the platform, even if they don’t support Musk’s changes to Twitter.
“People are incentivized to pay for software based on use case rather than political leanings,” explained Ashley, a sex worker and researcher who prefers not to share her full name.
For sex workers, who have been frequently fired, locked in the shadows, cut off from life-sustaining sources of income, eight dollars equals the safety net that Twitter Blue provides. Aside from the blue check — which some subscribers don’t even want, because it now carries such a stigma — Twitter Blue offers priority search rankings, two-factor authentication via SMS and longer video uploads.
“I think we can point to concrete evidence that having Twitter Blue will boost your visibility,” said Dr. Olivia Snow, a dominatrix who researches sex work and technology policy at the UCLA Center for Online Critical Inquiry. For sex workers who often experience shadow blocking and deprioritization in search results, Twitter Blue’s auto-boost is very important.
Besides Reddit, Twitter is the only major social platform that allows users to upload sexually explicit content. For sex workers, that makes Twitter essential for directing potential clients to their paid offers on sites like OnlyFans.
“Twitter is really the main advertising venue at this point for sex workers,” Snow told TechCrunch.
The spreadsheet used by #BlockTheBlue #supporters lists nearly 400,000 accounts. Ashley said she pulled a smaller list of 300 accounts, which she analyzed to get insight into who uses Twitter Blue.
“Nothing special,” she told TechCrunch. “It’s not a target list in any way. The only thing I can say is that among the most followed accounts, a lot of them are people of color and not English.”
TechCrunch repeated a similar experiment, pulling fifty random names from a spreadsheet. About half of those users were non-English speakers, and five of them openly expressed right-wing or anti-LGBTQ views — but didn’t seem to deliberately harass anyone. However, these sample sizes are very small compared to the hundreds of thousands of Twitter Blue users.
“Among the English language accounts, I also feel like most of them are creators, people who might want to upload videos longer than two minutes, fan accounts or freelance journalists,” said Ashley. indicated Unicorn Riota left-wing media outlet, subscribe to Twitter Blue so you can upload entire clips of their video journalism.
Amanda Gulka, a YouTuber with Swell Entertainment, signed up for Twitter Blue to gain access to text-based two-factor authentication. She told TechCrunch that once Twitter made this a paywall-protected feature, it encountered bugs that prevented it from signing up for three different types of app-based two-factor authentication, which aren’t paywalled. It sure was hacked. When she finally got her account back, she signed up for Twitter Blue.
“I’ll immediately put in my description box, ‘I’m not happy I have Twitter Blue either,’” Gulka said in a YouTube video. “I just want the two-factor authentication.”
For content creators like Golka, the ongoing issues with enabling app-based two-factor authentication make Twitter Blue a must-have. Without it, she feels vulnerable to losing her account again, and worries that a hacker will try to scam her followers.
Sex workers also worry about bad actors defrauding their followers. Although the blue check has lost much of its old meaning, Twitter has taken some steps to make it more difficult (but not impossible) to impersonate people. Therefore, the presence of a blue check still indicates the legitimacy of your leads. Twitter removes the user’s blue check mark if they change their display name, for example. Some reluctantly verified users have taken advantage of this feature by periodically changing their name so they can hide the check.
“Some sex workers feel more motivated to get[the blue check]to make sure they get it before others,” Ashley told TechCrunch. “We know from customer feedback that it helps them differentiate themselves from catfish.”
Ashley said clients of sex workers sometimes get scammed when the hackers pretend to be them and ask for money.
“As much as the meme accounts also contain catfish, it’s the sex workers who lose their fans thousands of dollars,” Ashley said. “This takes tens of thousands of dollars out of the pockets of sex workers.”
Twitter Blue use cases are variable, so sex workers consider it a form of censorship when well-meaning personalities support #BlockTheBlue. While some argue that paying to Elon Musk is a tacit form of support, Snow says we’re all lining Musk’s pockets even with Twitter — and Twitter Blue barely made a dent in the platform’s bottom line, anyway.
“We have to earn money to live and eat, and Twitter is by far the biggest driver of traffic for OnlyFans,” Snow said. “What else are we supposed to do? We are not allowed on other platforms.”