Elon Musk claims the Twitter blue tick will cost $8 per month.

18

Elon Musk claims the Twitter blue tick will cost $8 per month. According to Elon Musk, Twitter will charge users who want a blue checkmark next to their name to indicate a verified account $8 (£7 per month).

Mr. Musk claimed it was “necessary to beat spam/scam” as part of the reforms made after a $44 billion (£38 billion) buyout of the social media platform.

The blue tick icon next to a username, which is often reserved for well-known people, is presently free.

Critics claim that the change may make it more difficult to locate trustworthy sources.

The richest man in the world, Mr. Musk, noted that premium customers would receive preferential treatment in replies and searches, as well as half as many adverts.

“People power, indeed! The billionaire referred to the previous technique of blue tick authentication as a “lords and peasants system” and demanded that it be changed to Blue for $8/month “.

Elon Musk claims the Twitter blue tick will cost $8 per month. However, Nu Wexler, the former head of global policy communications at Twitter, cautioned that charging for blue ticks would make it more difficult to identify false information.

“Verification is one of the techniques that journalists, academic researchers, and certain consumers use to filter out misinformation or low-quality material with disinformation as an issue that a lot of platforms are suffering with,” Mr. Wexler said on the BBC’s Today program.

It is more difficult to go through misinformation and get reliable information if blue checks are being offered as rent.

For those whose identities were targets for impersonation, such as celebrities, politicians, and journalists, Twitter’s previous method of confirming users for a blue tick involved a brief online registration form.

The mechanism was put in place by the business in 2009, following a lawsuit accusing it of not doing enough to stop fake accounts. The Guardian reported that as of 2021, there were roughly 400,000 verified users on Twitter.

However, Mr. Musk is still up against a significant obstacle as he attempts to turn around Twitter’s company, which hasn’t turned a profit in years.

Even while some businesses have grown anxious about advertising on the site under his leadership, he has stated that he intends to lessen Twitter’s dependency on advertisements.

General Motors, a competitor of Elon Musk’s Tesla electric car startup, announced last week that it will stop running ads on the website.

According to a media buyer for a top advertising agency, several other well-known firms have more covertly suspended their advertising on the platform while they wait to see how Mr. Musk’s changes turn out.

IPG, one of the largest advertising agencies in the world, asked its customers to halt Twitter advertisements on Monday in order to gain more clarification about Twitter’s efforts to ensure “trust and safety” on the network. Some of the biggest corporations in the world send IPG billions of pounds each year to manage their marketing budgets.

Initial suggestions Elon Musk claims the Twitter blue tick will cost $8 per month. that the fee for blue tick rights could be $20 (£18) per month caused skepticism about the fee.

Many users of the platform agreed with the author Stephen King, who responded to news of the changes by writing that Twitter “should pay me.”

In a letter to Mr. King, Mr. Musk stated, “We need to find a way to pay the bills!”