Have you ever seen the nerd emoji fancam? The one with all the different nerd emoji variations on screen, paired with an absolutely goofy beat in the background? In my opinion, it perfectly encapsulates everyone who has paid to get a blue check on their Twitter account via Twitter Blue. You have to be a total clown to give Elon eight bucks.
For the uninitiated, here’s the meme in question. Truly iconic for me, a terminally online poster.
Anyway, I’ve had that beat stuck in my head all morning, because I just found an incredible browser extension that turns Elon’s completely ridiculous, fake, and stupid Twitter Blue verified badge into the nerd emoji. Yes, now you can distinguish between who’s actually verified, and who is just a little baby nerd who paid to look special on Twitter.
The nerd badge extension came about after notably not-verified Twitter user @shadowblood discovered that the new Twitter Blue verified checkmarks “are, more or less, fake.” In JavaScript, Twitter added a “is_blue_verified” line and kept the legacy “verified” line. This lets Twitter’s code distinguish between Twitter Blue subscribers and the kind of traditionally verified accounts that have since faced endless impersonation.
Long story short, this means your browser meaningfully knows the difference between an actual verified user and a “Blue verified” user, so you can easily program an extension to replace the badge for the latter. Eleven minutes after @shadowblood’s discovery, she proposed the verified nerd emoji badge image. Here she is in all her glory:
With untold opportunities now introduced to the Elon-mocking masses, Twitter user @chaoticvibing sprang into action and whipped up a mini browser extension that swaps out all Twitter Blue verified users’ badges with the nerd emoji badge. The code only took them 15 minutes, so keep in mind it might not be perfect. But here’s how their handiwork looks in action, per this right-wing nerd who forked over eight bucks to vomit verbal diarrhea about “the communists who control Biden” with their “woke idiocy.”
In comparison, here’s a tweet from an actual verified user, Death Stranding creator and notorious Toto fan Hideo Kojima.
Quite the timeline filter, right? You can go ahead and grab @chaoticvibing’s code for the Twitter Blue nerd emoji badge on GitHub. You’ll need to install some sort of userscript browser extension, such as ViolentMonkey or TamperMonkey, in order to copy the code over and import it.
Luckily, @chaoticvibing provides a quick step-by-step for how to import the userscript over in their programming, so don’t worry if this is your first time playing around with JavaScript. Chances are you’re better at it than Elon, anyway.
Correction: @chaoticvibing’s pronouns have been updated to match their preference.
(Featured image: Daniel Oberhaus/Flickr (CC-BY), Twitter. Remix by Ana Valens)
