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A new report from The New York Times says that Twitter is thinking about selling user names as a way to make more money. Elon Musk, who owns the microblogging platform, has been looking for new ways to make more money for the company, which is why this report came out.
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According to the report, the company’s engineers have thought about holding online auctions where people can bid on user names, also called “handles.” Since at least December, people have been talking about the possible new source of income.
The details of this idea are still vague, and it is still unclear whether it will affect all user names or just some of them.
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Elon Musk said in a tweet from last month that Twitter would soon start to free up 1.5 billion user names by deleting inactive accounts. In October, Musk bought the social network. In a tweet reply, he said that he was interested in freeing up accounts with user names that people wanted. Twitter’s policy on user name squatting says that user names can’t be bought and sold.
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Since Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, the billionaire has been looking for ways to boost the company’s revenue as ad revenue has gone down. Reports say that since Elon Musk took over Twitter, a lot of advertisers have left and the company has been lowering its own projections for how much money Twitter will make.
Twitter will soon start freeing the name space of 1.5 billion accounts
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 9, 2022
The report comes after the popular messaging app Telegram said it will hold an auction for user names for both individual accounts and channels in October 2022. The auction will take place on a marketplace built on the TON blockchain.
Also, Twitter Inc. said on Wednesday that there was no proof that the data that was recently sold online had been gotten by taking advantage of a weakness in the company’s systems.
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Twitter said that a bug it found early last year had exposed the information of 5.4 million accounts. It had already fixed the bug and told people about it in the summer.
Twitter said in a blog post that another 600 million pieces of user data “could not be linked to the previously reported incident or any new incident.”
In December, media reports said that someone could get access to the emails and phone numbers of more than 400 million Twitter users through the same security flaw that was found in January 2022.
