The perfect time to become the Pope

 My daughter has lost her blue tick on Twitter and I’m worried. How will I know it’s genuinely her that’s tweeting? 

Twitter has always been a strange and random place but Elon Musk, accidentally purchasing it and then being unable to back out has made it even stranger. He made his dog CEO, which tells you everything you need to know.

Over the last few weeks he has been saying that people will have to pay to keep their blue tick. It’s almost as though he thinks the blue tick is a badge of honour and maybe, for people like him: fame hungry weirdos, it was. However, it was designed to protect us mere mortals. Protection for the people who read, rather than produce the content. It doesn’t matter whether people know it’s genuinely me that tweeting a moving picture in support of the Ambridge Eurovision Appreciation Committee but it might be important to know it is genuinely a journalist, government organisation, the Pope, or even Harry Styles.

I have a long standing joke with a friend about him being the next Pope and so maybe this is his time. 

At the end of a very random teaching day (cats, willies, virginias, horn bippers and coronations) I logged onto Twitter to see a very odd tweet from Stephen King (genuine writing god) where he was telling everyone that he hadn’t paid for a blue tick or given Elon Musk his telephone number. Musk replied, saying that he had paid for King’s blue tick himself and that he loved Stephen and please could he have his number (I made the last bit up). He also loves Ice T, Lebron James and William Shatner. It’s not like the man’s a cliché at all. 

Pam Ayers also had something to say on the subject.

Then there was some confusion over the official government sites and the fake scammers.

So, that’s going well. It would be a good day to become the Pope.

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*Since writing this (and before publishing) there has been another strange policy change and all sorts of coloured ticks are appearing. Official governments have grey (interestingly, the one in the picture above that thought was the fake got the tick). Then there are gold ticks, which seem to have been given to the NewYorkTimes crossword page, Essex Cricket and every unwanted ad that pops up on my feed.

By the way, I’m the Pope!