Twitter Shutdown in Light of the Sunday Breakdown of Twitter Gold and Silver, and an Alternative Solution to Musk’s Misleading Attributes
Last month, Twitter announced it would start removing check marks on April 1 for those who weren’t paying for the symbols. The internal documents showed that a Gold Check mark was among the exceptions for the $1,000 a month fee that would be charged for verification.
The main account of the New York Times lost its blue check after it told CNN it wouldn’t pay for verification.
Musk replied to a meme posted by an account that engages with him, saying, “Oh ok, we’ll take it off then.” Musk lashed out at the Times in a series ofmissives that claimed the outlet’s coverage was boring and propaganda.
The weekend moves are just the latest example of Twitter creating confusion and whiplash for users over feature changes — and in this case, not just any users, but many of the most high-profile accounts that have long been a key selling point for the platform. It also highlights how Musk often appears to guide decisions about the platform more by whims than by policy.
In a separate puzzling move, Twitter’s blue bird logo at the top of the site was replaced on Monday with doge, the meme representing the cryptocurrency dogecoin, which Musk has promoted. On Monday, the price of dogecoin shot up 20%.
In early November, Twitter launched the option for people paying for its Twitter Blue subscription service to receive blue checks. The program was quickly put on pause after being plagued by a wave of celebrity and corporate impersonators, and was relaunched in December.
The idea that users who draw attention to the site should be required to pay for a feature that keeps came up in the days leading up to the blue check purge.
The new label could risk making it easier for people to scam or impersonate high profile users by muddying the reason accounts are verified. Experts in inauthentic behavior have also said it’s not clear that reserving verification for paid users will reduce the number of bots on the site, an issue Musk has raised on and off over the past year.
He said that there shouldn’t be a different standard for celebrities. The paid feature could also drive revenue, which could help Musk, who is on the hook for significant debt after buying Twitter for $44 billion.
Musk last week also said that starting on April 15, only verified accounts would be recommended in users’ “For You” feeds alongside the accounts they follow.
For a long time, celebrities, politicians and other notable individuals had been given free badges from the social networking site in order to show they were who they said they were. That helped Twitter because public figures drove “a disproportionate amount of engagement” on the service and the celebrities and politicians could post freely without fear of being impersonated, said Lara Cohen, Twitter’s former global head of marketing and partners.
The Federal Trade Commission refused to talk with Musk as it intensified an inquiry about the privacy and practices of social networking site, documents show.
In an email to his employees, Musk said that the company now has a value of about $20 billion, a drop from the $44 billion he paid to buy the company in October.
According to Sol Messing, a research associate Professor at New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics, users who have intentions of breaking the law can exploit the new paid service to gain a larger following.
When one iteration of Twitter Blue was rolled out last year, a user with a blue check pretended to be the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and tweeted that the company was offering insulin for free. Lilly’s stock price went down temporarily, but only after the company denial and apology, and the faketweet received a lot of retweets and likes.