Musk decides who will be authentic on Twitter
Elon Musk is delaying the launch of “Blue Verified” on Twitter ahead of the relaunch to November 29 “to make sure it’s rock solid” as the initial launch of paid verification has sparked myriad issues on his new social media platform .
In the Twitter CEO’s recent change in verification plans, Musk said in a Twitter conversation Tuesday night that the only way to tell if a user is an authentic celebrity or business is by how many of their followers are tagged with “Blue Verified ” get paid. .
It remains unclear whether these authentic celebrities or companies will have an “official” or “verified” tag under their name as the new CEO looks to remove unpaid old blue ticks over the next few months.
However, the plan does not seem certain for a long time. Four hours before confirming that verified followers are the most important metric, Musk mused that follower count and the arduous task of banning willful identity theft would be the answers to his verification woes.
But when former journalist and conservative Twitter commentator Ian Miles Cheong responded that several notable verified accounts have millions of followers but very little engagement, Musk pivoted to the view that verified follower count will be the key metric.
The message comes amid reports that Elon Musk sent an email to his entire staff late Tuesday night, in which he envisioned a “Twitter 2.0” that will be “extremely hardcore.” Musk outlined a new workforce that works at high intensity for very long periods of time, where “only exceptional performance constitutes a passing grade.” Washington Post and Gergely Orosz, author of the technology newsletter The Pragmatic Engineer, reported.
In the email, Musk said staff must confirm if they’re on board by 5 p.m. ET Thursday night; otherwise they will be released with three months’ severance pay.
The new Twitter
Elon Musk has so far fired half the people at Twitter, turned the entire C-suite upside down and is now urging more people to leave as he continues to make rapid changes within the company.
Musk just last week launched the Twitter Blue product, which allows users to add a blue tick next to their name for a fee of $7.99 per month — an icon previously only reserved for well-known individuals or public companies. Musk also promised users who pay for Twitter Blue that they would see half of the ads and that their posts would get extra visibility.
The move to launch Twitter Blue arose from the need for Twitter to diversify its revenue streams away from advertising on the platform, which traditionally accounts for 90% of social media revenue.
However, as new paying Twitter Blue users flooded the platform looking identical to previously verified Twitter users, the verification policy change heralded a surge in scammer accounts pretending to be celebrities, politicians and corporations.
This resulted in a large number of advertisers pausing their ad spend on the platform, with General Motors, United Airlines and Pfizer all cutting their spend until they are confident that Twitter is still a viable place to run their ads. Paris-based fashion brand Balenciaga even went so far as to remove its entire profile from the platform.
To date, around 150,000 users paid to subscribe to Twitter Blue — or about 0.1% of the 250 million users who log into the platform each day — before Twitter dropped the subscription offer due to an influx of scammer accounts that have thrown the platform into chaos , paused .
coarse content
Elon Musk’s Twitter has also become home to more hateful content. The use of racial slurs on Twitter has skyrocketed since Musk’s acquisition, according to a new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which says Musk’s claims that there would be a decline in hateful and racist language “do not stand up to scrutiny.”
Twitter’s head of trust and security, Yoel Roth, who Musk had relied on to curb malicious content, left the company last week on November 10.
As more and more people flee the ailing social media company, the world’s richest man is now faced with the task of finding a team of engineers willing to work long hours at high intensity to bring Twitter to his vision of a… town square for free speech.
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