Twitter Changes
Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter at the end of October, he made a lot of changes and controversial decisions. He laid-off around half of the workers and unbanned controversial Twitter users such as rapper Kanye West, former US president Donald Trump and influencer Andrew Tate. In addition, Musk said that Twitter will be deleting accounts that have been inactive for a certain period of time. This caused indignation among those, who have been cherishing the accounts of their loved ones, who have passed away.
The firm was running at a loss for a lenghty period of time so it needed to become profitable. Elon Musk did what most of the companies nowadays do and introduced a paid subscription. He called it TwitterBlue and launched it at the beginning of November, at first it was just a way to “get a blue checkmark, just like celebrities, and politicians you already follow”. Previously blue checkmark was limited only to those, who were verified by twitter meaning that this was their official account. In contrary to what Elon expected, people started abusing it to impersonate brands and famous people. There were even many cases of people impersonating Elon Musk himself leading to spread of misinformation on the platform.
Now it’s back, TwitterBlue in it upgraded form is available for purchase on the web for $8/month or on iOS for $11/month. That’s right, iOS users have to pay extra for absolutely nothing and that’s because of Apple’s 30% in-app purchase tax.
TwitterBlue features
But what do you actually get from this subscription? Here’s the list:
- Tweets from verified users will be prioritized, meaning that Twitter will list the tweets and replies from subscribers higher, to help fight scams and spam, as Twitter says
- You will see less ads, half of them to be exact, as Elon promised. Many people say thought that this won’t happen due to the impact it would have on Twitter’s ad revenue
- TwitterBlue subscribers will have access to posting longer videos and in 1080p quality making uploading videos to Twitter more YouTube-like.
- In addition, you will get access to Tweet editing, reader mode and of course, the blue checkmark right beside your account name. But this time, it will only come after your account has been reviewed by twitter
Eligibility criteria for the blue checkmark
The blue checkmark didn’t serve the intended purpose previously, so the Twitter team figured out a way to verify accounts this time:
- First of all, an account must have a display name and profile photo
- Account has to be older than 90 days, have a confirmed phone number and be active in the past 30 days
- Additionally the account must have no recent changes of profile picture, display name or username, otherwise the account has to be verified again
- Account must have no signs of being misleading and can’t have any signs of manipulation or spam
The checkmark will now only appear when the account meets the requirements.
New checkmarks
Twitter is also adding different checkmarks for different accounts. Gold checkmark will now appear beside official brand accounts and gray ticks will be visible on the goverment and multilateral accounts pages. Twitter is also working on a system that would enable brands to assign an indicator to accounts of its employees as another mean of verification.
Elon Musk hopes that these measures will reduce or even completely get rid of impersonators and spreading of misinformation. All of this requires manual reviews by twitter employees. Taking into consideration the amount of workers that has been laid-off by Musk, it seems like a hard task to do and something that will require more working hours.
In my opinion introducing TwitterBlue is a great move by Mr Musk, it will surely generate more profit for the company and help it in these dark times. I am sure that many users will be tempted by this subcription and decide to at least try it out.
Sources:
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