Elon Musk, Twitter's new CEO, appears to be having a tough time sorting out monetization plans for the micro-blogging and social media platform. Of course, Musk has happily acknowledged that the company will be doing a lot of "dumb things" in the coming weeks and months.
For those who've not been keeping an eye on the developing story, here's the gist of it - Twitter used to have a verifications system that would stick a blue tick next to users with verified accounts.
To verify your account, you needed to confirm your identity, have a notable presence on and off Twitter, manage an active Twitter account, and apply to Twitter for consideration as a verified user. Even if you didn't have any followers, you could get the blue check mark if you were a celebrity, business, organization or a similarly well-known entity.
After Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, he decided that this “lords and peasants” system wasn't fair. Anyone reading between the lines (lines which forgot to note that Musk was forced to take on massive amounts in debt to buy Twitter) could tell that this was the eccentric billionaire's plan to monetize the site.
Soon, a new plan costing $7.99 was announced that would let anyone (on iOS only, for the initial launch) buy a blue tick. This meant that just about any user, no matter whether the user were a celebrity or not, could pay for a blue tick against their username. This means that anyone could pretend to be themselves or someone else (including a corporation) and buy a blue tick of verification.
Musk should have known the nature of the beast he unleashed. Very soon people were creating fake accounts impersonating real people and brands. A spurious blue-check account (@EliLillyandCo) for pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly tweeted, “We are excited to announce insulin is free now" and saw the actual company's stock fall by 4.37%.
Even though Twitter had announced that an "Official" label meant to differentiate verified accounts from Twitter Blue subscribers would be rolled out, it's clear that to a lot of users, this distinction would not be...clear.
Cut to the present, as of the second week of November 2022, Twitter is temporarily refusing applications for paid Twitter Blue accounts.
Some people who bought the blue ticks for their accounts apparently saw this verification badge disappear too. It's likely that these blue checkmarks will be reinstated soon enough. Let's wait and watch.
Comments