Elon Musk has already scrapped the labels of ‘official’ under the accounts of verified real accounts, claiming that from here on out the ‘blue check will be the great leveller’.
Earlier on, it seemed as if Musk had decided to allow certain accounts – ones of government agencies and officials, companies, media outlets, and a few public figures, for example – to remain verified as ‘official’.
Now, it seems as if he’s rowed back upstream on that front.
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This all started because YouTuber Marques Brownlee noticed he was tweeting and no longer had the ‘official’ tag beneath the account.
Musk replied to him, explaining: “I just killed it.”
The world’s richest man and new Twitter chief then said: “Blue check will be the great leveler. [sic],”
It seems that one of the ways that Musk has struck upon to generate revenue is to make those who already have a blue tick and want to keep it pay a monthly subscription to be verified.
The first few weeks of the Musk regime at Twitter have been interesting, to say the least.
First off, he completed the takeover for an eye-watering $44 billion by turning up at the company’s headquarters with a sink – it’s a bad joke to which the punchline was ‘let that sink in’.
Then, in an even worse joke he sacked a whole load of the staff, before then reportedly hiring some of them back afterwards.
His big problem seems to be that Twitter isn’t quite the revenue generating behemoth that many other social networks are, which is why he wants to revise the Twitter Blue idea, as well as fundamentally changing what the famous blue tick means.
It used to be free to people who could be deemed in the ‘public interest’ as well as official accounts, but now Twitter Blue will replace that.
Twitter director of product management Esther Crawford announced that the revamped Twitter Blue ‘does not include ID verification – it’s an opt-in, paid subscription that offers a blue checkmark and access to select features’.
She added: “We’ll continue to experiment with ways to differentiate between account types.”
Musk also seems to have embraced the spirit of trial and error, tweeting: “Please note that Twitter will do lots of dumb things in coming months.
“We will keep what works & change what doesn’t.”
So, we can’t be sure whether the new Twitter Blue will require ID verification or not, now that high-profile accounts are no longer marked as ‘official’.
One thing we can be certain of is that there’s going to be a lot more of this sort of thing going on at Twitter HQ in the future.
There’s never a dull day with Elon at the helm, it would seem.
Tom Wood