E.U. Prepares Major Penalties Against X

> Blue checkmarks "used to mean trustworthy sources of information," Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton said.

Obviously you can write a law that says anything you want, but as an aesthetic matter, this strikes me as pretty ridiculous. A company makes up a thing called a "blue checkmark" and then, what, it has to mean the same thing for the rest of all time? It's not like the new Twitter lied about what was happening. They said plainly that they were changing the checkmark system to mean something new. Why would anybody cheer a government stepping in to say, "no, sorry, you can't do that?"

As much as we would like otherwise, law is a subjective tool. We implement objectivity as much as is feasible, e.g. using careful wording and precedent, but ultimately it would be a fool's errand to attempt to make it 100% objective/deterministic.

All this to say, we tend to oversimplify in our criticisms when more objectivity would have given us a result we agree with.

We tend to agree that we want laws to stop businesses from "tricking people". The specifics vary widely, but the goal itself is unavoidably subjective, so there will always be some subjectivity in its application.

There is no credible accusation that X itself is tricking people here, so your comment is a non sequitur. If particular accounts are posting fraudulent information, then go after those through regular legal channels. The platform is not the problem here.

> There is no credible accusation that X itself is tricking people here.

That is a purely subjective opinion, since I have talked to elderly people who assumed “blue checkmark = celebrity” and was therefore confused why there are so many such interactions on trivial posts.