New Twitter Blue verification system threatens to drown out reliable sports coverage

This is a column by Morgan Campbell, who writes opinion for CBC Sports.  For more information about  CBC's Opinion section , please see the  FAQ .

Here's a hack to help you navigate Twitter in 2023:

Any time you see somebody with a verified account post a bad, stupid, truly putrid take, click on that person's profile, and then click on the blue check itself. If Twitter's previous regime bestowed the check under the dictionary definition of verification — to assure the audience that the tweeter is who they say they are — your screen will indicate it.

"This is a legacy verified account," the disclaimer will read. "It may or may not be notable."

But the worse the take, the more likely you are, upon clicking the person's blue check, to see this message:

"This account is verified because it's subscribed to Twitter Blue."

That sentence tells you the tweeter is paying $8 US per month in exchange for increased visibility for their posts, the ability to edit tweets, and a blue checkmark next to their name. The checkmark matters. It signals to the audience that you're some mixture of authentic, authoritative and popular.

What does any of this have to do with sports? Everything.

Trades, free agent signings, fight announcements, significant injuries — they all get reported on Twitter minutes before they hit big outlets' websites, and hours before they appear in highlight shows and newspaper pages.

As long as Twitter is the first option for breaking news, and for keeping the 24/7 sports news cycle churning, the platform, and how it operates, will matter for journalists and sports fans alike.

WATCH | Tech reporter explains what's going on at Twitter:

Twitter's old verification gave us all a simple way to