Elon Musk is prepared to retest his problematic new Twitter verification mechanism. Once again in color.
Twitter’s CEO revealed in a tweet that the service’s tentatively scheduled debut of Verified will take place on Friday of the following week. He has made adjustments to the software that he ostensibly thinks will deter users from paying the $8 monthly subscription solely to mimic people or organizations.
“All verified accounts will be manually authenticated before check activates,” he tweeted. “Painful, but necessary.”
Given the significant personnel reductions and departures at Twitter since he took over a month ago, Musk didn’t clarify what will be done manually or how long that might delay the verification process.
The new system will use gold checks for businesses, gray checks for governments, and blue checks for everyone else, celebrities included.
All verified accounts will be manually authenticated before check activates. Painful, but necessary.
Elon Musk
Musk’s earlier attempt to roll out paid verified accounts resulted in a deluge of spoof accounts created by people pretending to be businesses and well-known Twitter users, including Musk himself. Musk then announced a further delay in the new system.
His plans for charging for verified accounts has been put on hold several times. Charging users for a verified account is a key to Musk’s plan to make Twitter less dependent upon advertising revenue, which has accounted for more than 90% of its revenue to date, and stem the loss of cash as advertisers pull back from the social media platform.
“All verified individual humans will have same blue check, as boundary of what constitutes ‘notable’ is otherwise too subjective,” Musk tweeted. “Individuals can have secondary tiny logo showing they belong to an org if verified as such by that org. Longer explanation next week.”
Facts on prices and the end date for the blue checks, which had been validated prior to Musk, are among the details absent from his tweets. Twitter, which is believed to have fired most or all of its public relations staff since Musk took over, did not respond to a request for details. Musk’s other companies, Tesla (TSLA) and SpaceX, have long not responded to requests for comment from most media outlets.
The tweet chain on which Musk made the announcement started with Musk replying to a tweet from former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich, a liberal economist, who was criticizing Musk’s mass layoffs since taking over Twitter.
“Here’s what Elon Musk fails to understand: Much of a corporations’ value lies in their workers their knowledge, skills, and ideas,” Reich tweeted. “When he fired half of Twitter’s workforce and drove off even more, he wasn’t ‘cutting costs.’ He was actively destroying what he bought.”
“Interesting … now pay $8,” Musk responded to Reich’s tweet.
