Elon Musk to introduce paid verification on Twitter & increase paid subscriptions

Elon Musk became the “owner” of Twitter last week. He tried, unsuccessfully, to worm his way out of the purchase or to somehow renegotiate the purchase, but in the end, he bought the Nazi hellsite for $44 billion. I haven’t seen any hard numbers to back this up, but I would assume that Musk has already lost money on this investment, as people are leaving the hellsite in droves and advertisers are sure to follow. Pretty soon, the only Twitter advertiser will be MyPillow. Musk is doing the most to devalue Twitter too – over the weekend, he tweeted a right-wing conspiracy about Paul Pelosi AT Hillary Clinton’s account… which he later deleted without apology. We have the owner of Twitter tweeting out hate and fascist conspiracies like he’s still some regular old Nazi sh-tposter. Speaking of Nazi sh-tposting, there’s already a significant rise in hate speech and racism on Twitter too.

In addition to all of that, Musk doesn’t understand – ?? – that the appeal of Twitter was always the fact that it’s free to use. It’s not a private club, it’s a messy democracy. Well, now Musk wants to charge money for verification and Twitter Blue:

Now that he owns Twitter, Elon Musk has given employees their first ultimatum: Meet his deadline to introduce paid verification on Twitter or pack up and leave.

The directive is to change Twitter Blue, the company’s optional, $4.99 a month subscription that unlocks additional features, into a more expensive subscription that also verifies users, according to people familiar with the matter and internal correspondence seen by The Verge. Twitter is currently planning to charge $19.99 for the new Twitter Blue subscription. Under the current plan, verified users would have 90 days to subscribe or lose their blue checkmark. Employees working on the project were told on Sunday that they need to meet a deadline of November 7th to launch the feature or they will be fired.

Musk has been clear in the months leading up to his acquisition that he wanted to revamp how Twitter verifies accounts and handles bots. On Sunday, he tweeted: “The whole verification process is being revamped right now.”

Even though he is barely three days into being “Chief Twit,” Musk has moved quickly to make changes at Twitter, first by changing its homepage for logged out users. With the help of Tesla engineers he has brought into Twitter as advisors, he’s also planning mass layoffs aimed at middle managers and engineers who haven’t recently contributed to the code base. Those cuts are expected to begin this week with managers already creating lists of employees to cut. Employees tasked with executing projects of Musk’s since he took control Thursday evening have been working late into the night and over the weekend.

[From The Verge]

I was never on Twitter Blue nor did I ever get verified, just FYI. While I used to love the Twitter community and I’m probably going to stay on the hellsite until the wheels truly come off, I’m not paying for any of it, plus I’m too lazy and too cheap to get verified. My suggestion would be: stay on Twitter for as long as you can stand it, but don’t pay a dime for it. I also hope advertisers leave in droves. Let’s make this Musk’s dumbest investment.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, JPI Studios / Avalon.

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