Twitter: charging soon for verification

Now that he owns Twitter, Elon Musk has issued his first ultimatum to employees: Leave or meet his deadline to use paid verification on Twitter.

Blue tick Verification will be charged

 familiar with the situation and internal correspondence seen by The Verge. According to Twitter’s plans, the new Twitter Blue subscription will cost $19.99 at the moment. Verified users would lose their blue checkmark after 90 days if they did not subscribe to the current plan. On Sunday, project workers were told that if they didn’t launch the feature by November 7, they would lose their jobs.

Musk made it abundantly clear in the months leading up to his acquisition that he wanted to alter the way Twitter checks accounts and deals with bots.On Sunday, he tweeted:The entire verification procedure is currently undergoing redesign.

Platformer’s Casey Newton first reported that Twitter was considering charging for verification.A spokesperson for Twitter had not responded to a request for comment as of press time.

Musk has made quick changes to Twitter, first by changing the homepage for users who are logged out, even though he has only been “Chief Twit” for three days. With the assistance of Tesla engineers that he has brought into Twitter as advisors, he is also planning massive layoffs aimed at middle managers and engineers who have not recently contributed to the code base. Managers have already compiled lists of employees who will be fired, and these cuts are expected to begin this week. Employees tasked with carrying out Since Musk assumed control Thursday evening, a lot of people have been using the Twitter Blue subscription for almost a year to view articles from publishers without ads and change the app, such as having a different icon on the home screen. In the few quarters Twitter reported earnings as a public company after that, advertising remained the vast majority of the company’s revenue.

Since Twitter has never been able to make money from its platform, Musk was able to buy it in the first place. Despite the company’s influence and popularity among institutions, celebrities, and journalists, it has never been profitable. Witter’s user base is significantly smaller than that of its rivals, with only 248 million monthly active users as opposed to Facebook’s 2.1 billion. Twitter is also inherently hostile to advertisers.

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Sign up for the NEWSWEEK NEWSLETTER > And things have only gotten worse. Even before Musk proposed purchasing Twitter, many of the company’s most dedicated tweeters left. These users, who are referred to as heavy tweeters, make up ten percent of all users but are responsible for ninety percent of the app’s content—but they are losing interest.

Twitter must either prevent its most active users from leaving or acquire new users to replace them in order to solve this issue.

An easy response is paid verification. It would fill the void left by those who were no longer interested by creating a new group of users who were motivated to spend time on the platform. Rebuilding trust in the platform and significantly increasing the number of users would result from making verification available to all users rather than just a select few.

A lot of people who disagree say that Twitter verification is more about security than status: It ensures that an individual is who they claim to be. However, Twitter lacks most of the security and identification features that other platforms offer, which is why the platform has such a high percentage of boatstone bots make the platform difficult to use and unfriendly.

NEWSWEEK SUBSCRIPTION OFFERS > Verifying all users—or as many as are willing to pay—would give those who had chosen to identify themselves through verification priority in tweets, mentions, and search results, putting an immediate stop to the problem of fake accounts. In this sense, bots would be far down the list and practically invisible.

To put it another way, Musk has devised a strategy that simultaneously addresses one of the most pressing issues facing users and monetizes an unmonitored platform, thereby resolving a problem for Twitter.

However, paid verification would also resolve another significant issue with Twitter:censorship.Twitter is one of the social media platforms with the most censorship. Lawyers, doctors, journalists, politicians, news organizations, charities, nonprofits, presidential candidates, Senators, members of Congress, YouTubers, streamers, gamers, semesters, and more have all had their popular, typically conservative, accounts taken down for bogus reasons. These people have gone missing for wrongdoing, and sometimes nothing at all.

The millions of conservatives who have been shadow banned, which we now know was done at the direction of the federal government, may have been worse than the outright bans. This has been extremely detrimental to Twitter’s relationship with its users, in addition to being morally repugnant.

Once more, verification will be helpful here: It will level the playing field for an affordable $8 per month by preventing the random, shadowy nature of who is promoted and who is hidden that has been taking place up until this point.

Despite its flaws, Twitter continues to dominate news, culture, and politics. However, it has a parasitic relationship with its users, requesting little in return for their time, passion, and loyalty. Twitter punishes users who lie and supports a small group of progressive elites.