Twitter, which has been headed by Elon Musk since late October, has launched a paid subscription programme for $8 per month, which will allow users to receive a blue tag, previously only allocated to verified accounts.
In a message conveyed in an update for Apple iOS devices on Saturday, the Twitter app communicated that users who “sign up now” can receive a blue checkmark next to their names, “just like the celebrities, companies and politicians you already follow” – reported the Associated Press.
The change marks the abandonment of the previous verification system used by Twitter since 2009. It was intended to prevent users from impersonating the accounts of well-known people, including politicians. Before the modification introduced on Saturday, there were around 423,000 verified accounts on the service, many of them belonging to journalists from around the world.
Experts have raised concerns about the end of the platform’s legacy verification system, which, while not perfect, helped Twitter’s 238 million users assess whether the accounts from which they were receiving information were authentic, the AP reported. The update that Twitter has rolled out to the iOS version of its app does not mention verification as the main task of the new blue-tag system.
Earlier this week, Jason Calacanis, Elon Musk’s long-time partner, published a poll asking Twitter users how much they were willing to pay for a verified Twitter account. The options were $5, $10, $15 and no fee. More than 81 per cent of respondents chose the last option.
The change came a day after the company began a process of mass layoffs. Around half of Twitter’s 7,500 employees have been made redundant, it was announced, via Twitter, by Yoel Roth, the company’s head of security. Even before taking over Twitter, Musk had repeatedly told potential investors and partners that he wanted to make a financial recovery for the company by laying off almost 75 per cent of its workforce. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey took the blame for such widespread job losses and apologised for the decisions he had made that he believed led to them. He wrote that he was responsible for the current situation because he had increased the size of the company too quickly.
Sources:
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/05/business/twitter-blue-checkmark-paid-subscription/index.html
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/11/05/twitter-ios-updated-8-month-subscription/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/05/twitter-launches-8-blue-tick-subscription-service
To be honest, I didn’t anticipate Elon Musk buying twitter in the first place, but since he did buy it for estimated cost of 44 billion dollars, I suppose that Musk is trying to compensate for the hefty amount spent for buying twitter, and this was apparent when said he is willing to fire 75% of twitters employees, and I think he’s doing it to lower the HR cost of the company, less employees means less amount of money spent into wages meaning more money saved and I think that it would be useful for the long term, many people criticized him for doing such actions but at the end of the day it is now his company and he’s free to do whatever he like with it.