Discussion
In my book *Enshittification*, I develop the concept of "giant teddybears," a scam that has been transposed from carnival midway games to digital platforms. The EU has just fined Elon Musk $140m for running a giant teddybear scam on Twitter:
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/08/giant-teddybears/#petty-ripoffs
1/
@pluralistic Higher fines, though - you don't deter someone who has everybody's money from anything with a fine that amounts to shaking out his couch cushions.
Fines could be a pain level, 0 to 100. Thousand bucks hurts working folk bad. 100 billion would hurt musk, maybe. Constant pain, scaled number.
@tomjennings @pluralistic Precisely. It's not about the amount, it's about what the punishing effect is on the person. Like, if you took 10K from me now I'd be mostly (!) OK, just pretty miffed, but a year ago I'm eating oatmeal for months & a few years earlier it would have put me on the street - the way it should work is we figure out what kind of consequence we're aiming to place on a person with effects like that & then translate it, including to billionaires.
@jwcph @tomjennings @pluralistic Finland, Norway and Switzerland have income-based fines for some motoring offenses, resulting in some pretty impressive penalties for wealthy speeders.
Growing up, August 15 always meant two things for my family: my mother's birthday and the first day of the CNE, a giant traveling fair that would park itself on Toronto's waterfront for the last three weeks of summer. We'd get there early, and by 10AM, there'd always be some poor bastard lugging around a galactic-scale giant teddybear that was offered as a prize at one of the midway games.
2/
Now, nominally, the way you won a giant teddybear was by getting five balls in a peach basket. To a first approximation, this is a feat that no one has ever accomplished. Rather, a carny had beckoned this guy over and said, "Hey, fella, I like your face. Tell you what I'm gonna do: you get just *one* ball in the basket and I'll give you one of these beautiful, luxurious keychains. If you win *two* keychains, I'll let you trade them in for one of these *gigantic* teddybears."
3/
Why would the carny do this? Because once this poor bastard took possession of the giant teddybear, he was obliged to conspicuously lug it around the CNE midway in the blazing, muggy August heat. All who saw him would think, "Hell if *that* dumbass can win a giant teddybear, I'm gonna go win one, too!" Charitably, you could call him a walking advertisement. More accurately, though, he was a Judas goat.
4/
Digital platforms have the ability to give out giant teddybears at scale. Because digital platforms have the flexibility that comes with running things on computers, platforms can pick out individual platform participants and make them King For the Day, showering them in riches that they will boast of, luring in other suckers who will lose everything:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/
5/
That's how Tiktok works: the company's "heating tool" lets them drive traffic to Tiktok performers by cramming their videos into millions of random people's feeds, overriding Tiktok's legendary recommendation algorithm. Those "heated" performers get millions of views on their videos and go on to spam all the spaces were similar performers hang out, boasting of the fame and riches that await other people in their niche if they start producing for Tiktok:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
6/
Uber does it, too: as Veena Dubal documents in her work on "algorithmic wage discrimination," Uber offers different drivers wildly different wages for performing the same work. The lucky few who get an Uber giant teddybear hang out in rideshare groupchats and forums, trumpeting their incredible gains from the platform, while everyone else blames themselves for "being bad at the app," as they drive and drive, only to go deeper and deeper into debt:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men
7/
Everywhere you look online, you see giant teddybears. Think of Joe Rogan being handed hundreds of millions of dollars to relocate his podcast to Spotify, an also-ran podcast platform that is desperately trying to capture the medium of podcasting, turning an open protocol into a proprietary, enclosed, Spotify-exclusive content stream:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/27/enshittification-resistance/#ummauerter-garten-nein
8/
The point of the conspicuous, over-the-odds payment to Rogan isn't just to get Rogan onto Spotify - it's to convince every other podcaster that Spotify is a great place to make podcasts for. It isn't, though: when Spotify bought Gimlet Media, they locked Gimlet's podcasts inside Spotify's walled garden/maximum security prison.
9/
If you wanted to listen to a Gimlet podcast, you'd have to switch to using Spotify's app (and submitting to Spotify's invasive surveillance and restrictions on fast-forwarding through ads, etc).
Pretty much no one did this. After an internal revolt by Gimlet podcast hosts - whose podcasts were dwindling to utter irrelevance because no one was listening to them anymore - Spotify moved those Gimlet podcasts back onto the real internet, where they belong.
10/
When Musk bought Twitter, he started handing out *tons* of giant teddybears - most notably, he created an opaque monetization scheme for popular Twitter posters, which allowed him to thumb the scales for a few trolls he liked, who obliged him by loudly proclaiming just how much money you could make by trolling professionally on Twitter. Needless to say, the vast majority of people who try this make either nothing, or a sum so small that it rounds to nothing.
11/
But Musk's main revenue plan for Twitter - the thing he repeatedly promised would allow him to recoup the tens of billions he borrowed to buy the platform - was selling blue tick verification.
Twitter created blue ticks to solve a serious platform problem. Twitter users kept getting sucked in by impersonators who would trick them into participating in scams or believing false things.
12/
To protect those users, Twitter offered a verification scheme for "notable people" who were likely to face impersonation. The verification system was never very good - I successfully lobbied them to improve it a little when I was being impersonated on Twitter (I got them to stop insisting that users *fax* them a scan of their ID, or, more realistically, to send them ID via a random, insecure email-to-fax gateway). But it did the job reasonably well.
13/
Predictably, though, the verification scheme also became something of a (weird and unimportant) status-symbol, allowing a certain kind of culture warrior to peddle grievances about how only "lamestream media libs" were getting blue ticks, while brave Pizzagaters and 4chan refugees were denied this important recognition.
14/
Musk's plan to sell blue ticks leaned heavily into these grievances. He promised to "democratize" verification, for $8/month (or, for businesses, many thousands of dollars per month). Users who didn't buy blue ticks would have their content demoted and hidden from their own followers. Users who paid for blue ticks would have their content jammed into everyone's feeds, irrespective of whether Twitter's own content recommendation algorithms predicted those users would enjoy it.
15/
Best of all, Twitter wouldn't do much verifying - you could give Twitter $8, claim to be anyone at all, and chances are, you would be able to assume any identity you wanted, post any bullshit you wanted, and get priority placement in millions of users' feeds.
This was a massive gift to scammers, trolls and disinformation peddlers. For $8, you could pretend to be a celebrity in order to endorse a stock swindle, shitcoin hustle, or identity theft scheme.
16/
You could post market-moving disinformation from official-looking corporate accounts. You could pose as a campaigning politician or a reporter and post reputation-destroying nonsense.
This is where the EU comes in. In 2024, the EU enacted a pair of big, muscular Big Tech antitrust laws, the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
17/
These are complex pieces of legislation, and I don't like everything in them, but some parts of them are *amazing*: bold and imaginative breaks from the dismal history of ineffective or counterproductive tech regulation.
Under the DSA, the EU has fined Twitter about $140m for exposing users to scams via this blue tick giant teddybear wheeze (much of that sum is punitive, because Twitter flagrantly obstructed the Commission's investigations).
18/
The DSA (sensibly) doesn't require user verification, but it *does* expect companies that *tell their users* that some accounts are verified and can be trusted, that they *actually* can be trusted.
I think there's a second DSA claim to be made here, beyond the failure to verify. Musk's plan to sell blue ticks was a disaster: while many, many scammers (and a few trolls) bought blue ticks, no one else did.
19/
The blue tick - which Musk thought of as a valuable status symbol that he could sell - was quickly devalued. "Account with a blue tick" was never all that prestigious, but under Musk, it came to mean "account that pushes scams, gore, disinformation, porn and/or hate."
So Musk did something *very* funny and sweaty. He restored blue ticks to millions of high-follower accounts (including my own).
20/
And despite the fact that Musk had created about a million different kinds of blue ticks that denoted different kinds of organizations and payment schemes, these free blue ticks were indistinguishable from the paid ones.
In other words, Musk set out to trick users into thinking that the most prominent people they followed believed that it was worth spending $8/month on a blue tick. It was an *involuntary* giant teddybear scam.
21/
Every time a prominent user with a free blue tick posts, they help Musk trick regular Twitter users into thinking that these worthless $8/month subscriptions are worth shelling out for.
I think the Commission could run another, equally successful enforcement action against Musk and Twitter over this scam, too.
22/
Trump has been bellyaching nonstop about the DSA and DMA, threatening EU nations and businesses with tariffs and other TACO retribution if they go ahead with DSA/DMA enforcement. Let's hope the EU calls his bluff.
Of course, Musk *could* get out of paying these fines by moving all his businesses out of the EU, which, frankly, would be a major result for Europe.
23/
I'm on a tour with my new book, the international bestseller Enshittification!
Catch me next in #Madison, CT (TONIGHT!); #Hamburg; and #Denver!
Full schedule with dates and links at:
https://pluralistic.net/tour
24/
This is a bonfire demo instance for testing purposes. This is not a production site. There are no backups for now. Data, including profiles may be wiped without notice. No service or other guarantees expressed or implied.
