Sansevere: Twitter doesn’t consider Alan Page “notable”
Bob Sansevere
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There are a lot of dumb and ignorant people out there, and I’m not even thinking about any politician or talk-show host.
I am referring to the dunderhead who denied Hall of Famer and retired Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Alan Page a blue check mark next to his name on Twitter.
A blue check mark, according to Twitter, is considered a blue Verified badge that “lets people know that an account of public interest is authentic. To receive the blue badge, your account must be authentic, notable, and active.”
Page applied for the blue mark and, like most everyone but maybe the dimwit who gave him the Twitter version of the Heisman, he must have figured he would be a slam dunk.
Then he received this from some twit with Twitter: “The account will not be verified at this time because the evidence provided did not meet our criteria for notability. As a result, we could not reliably verify that the account associated with the request is a notable person, organization, or brand.”
They, ahem, “could not reliably verify the the account associated with the request is a notable person …”
Perhaps they should have tried doing what I just did. Type “Alan Page” into the Google search engine. In 0.65 seconds, 1,170,000,000 results came up. Yep, 1.7 billion results for Alan Page.
Page, who goes by @ACPage_77 on Twitter and has 15.5 thousand followers, had a great tweet after being denied: Not notable! Hmmm.!”
Many folks on Twitter reacted with everything from shock to sarcasm to outrage at Page being denied his rightful blue checkmark.
One of my favorite reactions came from noted Minnesota-born writer and blue check marked Steve Rushin, who tweeted, “Ahem. The baller, scholar, philanthropist, Sousaphonist, NFL MVP, U of M JD, have-gavel-will travel justice seeker, antiquer, groundbreaker, syrup-maker & school namesaker who built the Hall of Fame in which he’s enshrined *is* a “notable” tweeter, leader and Purple People Eater.”
Presumably, Rushin was up against Twitter’s word count or he also would have mentioned that Page was the first defensive player to win that NFL Most Valuable Player Award and only Lawrence Taylor has done it since, and that Page is in the College Football Hall of Fame, the Vikings Ring of Honor, was Minnesota’s first African-American Supreme Court Justice and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018.
But, according to some Twitter loop-de-loop, Alan Page is not notable.
As the Wicked Witch of the West said as she melted, “Oh, what a world … what a world!”
(Bob Sansevere hosts the daily podcast “The BS Show” that also is broadcast on radio stations in Duluth (WDSM), Hibbing (WNMT), St. Cloud (WBHR) and Worthington (the RadioWorks Network). He also co-hosts the weekly JimBob Sports Jamboree with Vikings legend Chuck Foreman and Fox 9’s Jim Rich; that show can be heard on about a dozen radio stations across Minnesota. And he will be returning to the KQ Morning Show, where he spent more than 30 years, to give weekly Vikings updates.)