Elon Musk continues to generate free publicity for his new plaything Twitter, this time proposing charging Blue Checks $8 per month for the symbol of verification of ID.

The Blue Check emerged in the late 2000s after various celebrities such as Shaquille O’Neal and Tony La Russa complained about Twitter accounts under their name impersonating and/or parodying them. It’s useful in that otherwise Twitter would consist of little but outraged netizens replying to celebrity impersonators.

On the other hand, getting a Blue Check was always conflated in Twitter’s mind with “notability.” Twitter didn’t let anybody apply for a Blue Check until this decade, instead initiating the process with the Really Important People (in its view).

And even after it finally started to accept applications, it turned down the application of Alan Page, the 1971 NFL Most Valuable Player and a retired justice of the Minnesota supreme court, for lack of “notability.”

And Blue Checks became conflated with political respectability, with Twitter deleting the Blue Checks of Richard Spencer and other Bad People in 2018 for their Badness.

Hence, Twitter wound up with the situation where, say, associate editors at Teen Vogue had Blue Checks but Charles Murray, a major force in American intellectual life since the mid-1980s, did not.