Twitter Chaos

The key problem with the Internet is trust. Or lack of it. There is tons of information. It is just almost impossible to tell for sure what is real and what is fake. 

Interestingly it is much easier for machines to verify what to trust, because of the established authentication protocols based on widely adopted cryptographic standards.

For humans it is just a jungle of click-baits. Ultimately what we verify is what we see. And what we see is rendered by applications, displayed on screens. And very often what we see looks legit while it is not. The whole problem of scam and phishing. 

And it takes years to build the trust. Then, as Elon Musk demonstrated during his week at Twitter, it is just a moment to ruin the reputation.

[For those who were not following: Twitter had had a "blue mark" program for high profile celebrities and institutions. Musk started selling this mark for $8 to anyone, without verification. So there was an eruption of imposter accounts, all granted the Twitter Verified blue badge. It led to gigantic confusion, companies losing billions in market cap on stock exchanges. A total chaos]

Now the question is - what would it take to recover the trust? Can it be recovered at all? Twitter is no longer public - which itself was a sort of guarantee it would not do stupid things. Now it is in the hand of a mad man, who does not listen nor report to anyone. He can do what he wants, but it is unlikely Twitter will ever regain a status of neutral, reliable, and trusted. It will be of course interesting to see how it plays out, byt the days of it being independent and responsible are gone.