Portside

SAN FRANCISCO (The Borowitz Report)—In a policy shift, Twitter announced that it will bestow blue checks only on users it called “verified conspiracy theorists.”

Elon Musk, the platform’s new owner, said that the policy was designed to “curate a world-class collection of the most prominent paranoiacs working today.”

“We will be vetting conspiracy theorists to insure that they have an established track record of disseminating falsehoods,” he said. “For the benefit of our users, we want to make a clear distinction between the Dinesh D’Souzas of the world and some rookie crackpot hoping to become a major-league crackpot.”

Musk’s announcement, however, drew howls of protests from the baseless-theory-spreading community, with some members complaining that Twitter was discriminating against no-name fabulists looking for their big break.

“I recently tweeted that John Wilkes Booth killed Lincoln as part of a drug deal gone bad,” @OptimusTruthBeacon911 said. “If that doesn’t get me a blue check, what will?”

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Andy Borowitz is a New York Times best-selling author and a comedian who has written for The New Yorker since 1998. In 2001, he created The Borowitz Report, a satirical news column that has millions of readers around the world, for which he won the first-ever National Press Club award for humor. The Borowitz Report was acquired by The New Yorker in 2012. His two most recent books were both best-sellers: “The 50 Funniest American Writers,” which became the first title in the history of the Library of America to make the Times best-seller list; and a memoir, “An Unexpected Twist,” a No. 1 best-seller, which Amazon named the Best Kindle Single of 2012. His latest book, “Profiles in Ignorance: How America’s Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber,” is forthcoming in 2022. As a comedian, Borowitz has performed sold-out shows around the world and has made numerous television and radio appearances, including on NPR, VH1, and Comedy Central. His solo comedy show, “Make America Not Embarrassing Again,” toured the U.S. from 2018 to 2020. He has been called a “Swiftian satirist” (the Wall Street Journal), “one of the country’s finest satirists” (the Times), and “one of the funniest people in America” (CBS News’s “Sunday Morning”).

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