A Twitter Alternative By Ex-Employee Is Capitalizing On Elon Musk's Worst Trust Failure

T2 is among the many alternative Twitter platforms that have popped up ever since Elon Musk splurged $44 billion to buy the social media company and executed some questionable plans. The brainchild of a former Google and Twitter employee, the company started accepting sign-ups back in November last year and raised a sizeable funding in January this year. Now, the company is capitalizing on Elon Musk's latest flub — taking away the blue badge from legacy verified accounts, unless they pay the Twitter Blue toll tax.

While T2 is still very much in its nascent stage, the company has launched a verification program of its own. However, it's not some in-house verification system that would involve vetting how notable you are. Instead, T2 is proposing that if you had a verified account on Twitter based on your public importance — or as they call it in the social media sphere, "notability" — the upstart will carry it over to your T2 profile. T2 is currently accepting applications from Twitter users that had a verified account and are now jumping ship to T2. "We know you worked hard for it," says the registration page for T2's verification request page for Twitter ex-pats. T2 is clearly trying to capitalize on the trust deficit that Twitter currently faces under its new CEO Musk.

One of the questions that T2 asks while submitting a verification request is whether your account was legacy verified or if you paid to get the blue badge after Musk's decision to make a Twitter Blue subscription mandatory for enjoying the verified account status. However, you are only eligible if your account was verified based on its importance. Twitter Blue subscribers are not eligible, and neither can you apply for verification on T2 if you weren't verified on Twitter. Once the aforementioned prerequisites are met, Twitter migrants users will have to submit details like their name, Twitter username, and their professional inclination, after which they're given the option to pick up a T2 handle name.

The final step is submitting an email address where T2 will share further details about the verification request process. T2 co-founder says "the checkmark should be a safety feature of the platform" and that the company was even putting users on its waitlist that didn't have a verified account on Twitter. T2 is trying to fill the void left by Twitter, where a verified blue badge no longer means you are a notable personality or an authentic source of information. With Musk stripping legacy account holders of their blue badge, most of whom are not willing to pay the Twitter Blue fee to keep it, the risks of fake news proliferation, inauthentic behavior, and scams on Twitter are expected to skyrocket.