Elon Musk Defends Paid Twitter Ahead of Blue Tick Verification
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On Friday, Elon Musk defended his contentious method of receiving payment on Twitter, claiming that any other social media platform that didn’t follow suit would fail due to a bot invasion.
Elon Musk said on the day before Twitter’s April 1 deadline that verified accounts with the prized blue tick that hadn’t paid money would lose it if they hadn’t paid.
Elon Musk said during a question-and-answer session on Twitter, “The main problem is that it’s easy to make literally 10,000 or 100,000 fake Twitter accounts using just one computer at home and modern AI.”
“That’s why we’re really pushing hard on verified, which requires a credit card and a phone number from a reputable phone carrier,” Elon Musk said.
“Any so-called social media network that doesn’t do this, I think, will fail,” Musk said.
Companies, journalists, and famous people who used Twitter as their main way to communicate and relied on the blue tick are now under more pressure.
It also brings up the idea that scammers and pranksters might pay for a verified account that is completely fake.
Also, Elon Musk bought Twitter five months ago for $44 billion. He says that its worth now is…
In the US, the subscription plan, called Twitter Blue, costs $8 a month or $84 a year, or $11 a month if bought through Apple’s app store.
Since it was made in 2009, the blue tick or checkmark has become a signature feature that has helped the platform become a place where newsmakers and activists can trust each other.
But Musk and his supporters said that the blue check was chosen by fiat in a secretive way and that it was a sign of an unfair class system.
Elon Musk was the new owner of Twitter last year. One of the first things he did was make the blue tick available only to paying subscribers.
Within hours, verified fake accounts on Twitter were pretending to be celebrities, big companies, and even Elon Musk himself.
Musk quickly changed his mind, but many advertisers left the site. This cut off a big source of income for Twitter, which the CEO is still trying to replace.
For now, blue checks of celebrities like Justin Bieber and his 113 million followers or Cristiano Ronaldo and his 108 million are marked on the site as “legacy” accounts.
‘Will be Awful’
Officials, nonprofits, and media organizations are also affected by the verified account dilemma.
According to Axios, even though the White House will continue to enjoy a special status as a government institution, it has already informed its employees that it will not be paying to have its employees’ official Twitter profiles retain the blue tick.
Under Musk’s new method, news media outlets, businesses, and charities no longer have the blue tick and are instead labeled as verified businesses.
According to Twitter’s pricing page, the monthly subscription for one of these is a whopping $1,000 in the United States, plus $50 for any extra account that is associated with it.
Andrew Stroehlein, European Media Director for Human Rights Watch, said his organization would not pay the new fees since it would be “terrible” for individuals who could not otherwise afford to do so.
He continued by saying in a blog post that the change will have a negative impact on the ability of “local activists, notably human rights advocates, who have long used Twitter for grassroots organizing.”
The New York Times has publicly said that it will not subscribe to a verified business account and will only pay for a blue tick for writers in exceptional circumstances.
Facebook, a competitor to Twitter, is also testing the “pay to play” verification model in Australia and New Zealand, and it has received a lot of backlash for the same reasons.
Musk has a lot riding on his ability to develop a sustainable revenue stream for Twitter.
Half of what he paid for the social media company just five months ago, Musk values Twitter at $20 billion, which he said last week.
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