Yet responding to the people who actually like Beto seems like part of the deal, his most ardent constituency being the “blue checks” of Twitter, that ridiculous chimera of Tracy Flick, Biff Tannen, and every suspicious boyfriend from the Scream franchise.
The blue checks of Twitter attacked New York Times columnist David Brooks for his latest column attempting to explain how a Trump voter in middle America views the president’s potential impeachment.
2020, Joanne McNeil, Lurking: How a Person Became a User, unnumbered page:
It is a cardboard gold crown, but it helps in certain cases; for example, Twitter support will prioritize intervention requests when trolls attack a blue check.
2020, Kevin Munger, "All the News That’s Fit to Click: The Economics of Clickbait Media", Political Communication, Volume 37, Issue 3 (2020), page 392:
The same anti-media sentiment that enables zero-credibility websites has led some users to employ “blue check” as a slur, particularly in the plural (“the blue checks are rallying around the media establishment”).
2020, Matt Thrift, "More Political Talk", The Johnsonian (Winthrop University), 29 January 2020, page 4:
According to The Hill, The Human Rights Campaign's President Alphonso David criticized Sanders for accepting Rogan's endorsement along with a number of 'blue check' Twitter users.
Some posted images of the French Revolution or the Korean film ‘Parasite’ as a way to show the feelings of the masses when the powerful “elites” of Twitter could not use their accounts. This is due to a perception that many “blue checks” only retweet each other and that the social media giant somehow prioritizes these verified accounts.
