According to Elon Musk, Twitter verification will be back the following week with color-coded categories for people, organizations, and government accounts.
The site will debut a new verification mechanism on Friday of the following week, according to Twitter’s new owner. A previous attempt at a redesign that granted blue ticks to accounts paying $7.99 (£6.60) a month was scrapped after it resulted in a wave of phony accounts. According to Musk, verified accounts in the new system would display a blue checkmark for individuals, a grey checkmark for “government,” and a gold checkmark for businesses.
All validated accounts, he added, would undergo “manual authentication.” He remained vague as to whether any of the new checkmarks would be subject to a charge, as there was with the prior verification update. Blue ticks, which identify Twitter accounts as authentic sources and are currently present on more than 400,000 of them, are typically granted to well-known accounts like those belonging to celebrities, politicians, journalists, government agencies, and large organizations. Musk stated that the new blue tick would be available to everyone, “famous or not,” and that if an organization verified them, individuals may get a supplementary, “small,” mark proving their membership. He promised to give a more thorough explanation the following week.
His last attempt to redesign verification was put on hold earlier this month when it resulted in a large number of phony accounts. He believes that overhauling verification is vital to lower annoying automated accounts on the site and generate much-needed income through subscriptions. When Twitter Blue, the platform’s premium service, was relaunched earlier this month, users could spoof businesses like Eli Lilly and Tesla for less than $10 by purchasing a blue tick for $7.99. The redesign was abandoned shortly after. One of the reasons that Omnicom, a significant advertising agency, advised its clients to stop advertising on Twitter was the impersonation issue.
Before the disastrous introduction of Blue, Bloomberg reported in early November that government institutions wouldn’t be paid for verification. According to its most recent set of quarterly figures, Twitter had about 238 million daily users. However, that number has already surpassed 250 million, and user growth rates have reached “all-time highs” since Musk’s $44 billion buyout, according to tech news website The Verge. Musk made preparations for the reinstatement of banned accounts on the network the next week as he revealed the verification modification.
On Thursday, he said that suspended accounts would be eligible for a “universal amnesty” if they had not violated the law or “engaged in heinous spam.” Among the banned accounts are that of former Donald Trump strategist Steve Bannon and British right-wing broadcaster Katie Hopkins.
Twitter may levy a small fee to commercial and government users
Musk has acknowledged that Twitter’s ad income has dropped “massively” as a result of worries about his plans to moderate material on the platform, especially what will happen to banned accounts. He has informed Twitter staff that for the service to “survive the upcoming economic crisis,” “approximately half” of platform revenues must come from subscriptions. 90% of Twitter’s $5.1 billion in revenues came from advertising, according to its most recent annual reports.
