It has often been memed that you can count the amount of coders of Twitter on one hand. This is cited as being the reason Twitter traps people in verification loops when it suspects people are bots, at least when the other reason isn’t being cited which is the suspicion that Twitter wants to force everyone to use the app. If true, Twitter has less of a workforce than Wikipedia and even less of a workforce than minor art websites like Sheezy Art. SHEEZY ART has more of a workforce than Twitter. Think about that for a moment.

I was talking about this with someone I’m subscribed to on YouTube the other day. Today, they then got stuck in the verification loop in question. Usually people get stuck in these loops because they shared a link (god forbid) or even uploaded a picture, which often has the accidental side effect of someone being seen as a bot, since pictures are processed like links. This person’s crime? Simply copying and pasting a Twitter URL from Discord into a new tab. That was literally it. They pasted the link, and it brought them straight to the unverifiable verification page. Now they’re stuck there, forever.

And no, not everyone is able to chalk it up to “it’s Musk’s website, he can do what he wants with it”, because 1) Musk also says that accounts that are inactive for a certain amount of time become deleted, and 2) people like this YouTuber have their whole art career on this website. Combined, that means that once the account is banned, anyone who stole their pictures are now the OG owners of those pictures.

Elon Musk, you’re a trillionaire. I’m not saying this just as a way to be confronting, but it’s time to start acting like one. As someone who also has money, it’s worth mentioning that having this amount of money while being this bumbling is an unfortunate recipe for chronic theft (of goods, of services, etc.), as people begin to feel fed up and themselves cheated with no way out (because according to people in our modern culture, this should be how “great power without great responsibility” is sized down; their words, not mine).