First modification:
Twitter’s new boss, Elon Musk, announced Tuesday that users of the social network will have to pay $8 a month to have their account verified as authentic. The subscription will give them other advantages: their tweets will appear first, they will be able to publish longer videos and audio messages and they will be exposed to “half the advertising”.
Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, announced in a tweet on Tuesday, November 1, that he will soon launch a subscription of coho dollars per month for users who want their accounts to be certified as authentic and less exposed to advertising.
The social network has offered a subscription to paid functions since last year, but the CEO wants a new, more expensive and more widely accepted offer that diversifies the platform’s sources of income.
“The current system of lords and commoners, with those who have the tick blue and those who don’t, it sucks. Power to the people! Blue for $8 a month,” said the head of Tesla and SpaceX, which bought Twitter on Thursday.
Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit.
Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2022
Therefore, it plans to merge Twitter Blue – a subscription of 5 dollars a month for a more comfortable reading mode and editing tools – and the possibility for eligible accounts to have their identity verified and certified.
Currently, only certain profiles can request this authenticity of the blue mark, such as governments, companies, the media, political, cultural or sports personalities, etc. They may lose their badge if they are unable to use it. They can lose their badge if they do not respect the rules of the platform.
Priority Tweets
Since Friday, Elon Musk has asked engineers to work tirelessly on this system overhaul. He said subscribers would have other advantages: their tweets would appear first, they could post longer videos and audio messages, and they would be exposed to “half the advertising.”
Twitter Blue currently provides access to free, ad-free articles from hundreds of news sites. This will remain the case in the new version “for publishers who are willing to work with us,” Elon Musk said without elaborating.
The price of the subscription will be adjusted depending on the country. “This will also bring revenue to Twitter to reward content creators,” she concluded.
The richest man in the world has repeated since the beginning of the turbulent inauguration process that he embarked on this operation to reinforce freedom of expression in this “public square” essential for democracy.
You have said that profitability is not your priority. But Twitter is a network that gets 90% of its revenue from advertising and has never been very profitable compared to its Californian neighbors Meta (Facebook, Instagram) and Google (YouTube).
“Fuck Them”
And while Elon Musk promises that the Twitter platform won’t become unlivable once he relaxes content moderation rules, some advertisers are concerned.
On Friday, automaker General Motors announced that it was temporarily removing its ads from Twitter. The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) also highlighted the importance of brands removing “toxic content”.
Therefore, it seems necessary to diversify income. According to the specialized site The Verge, Elon Musk initially considered increasing the price of the subscription to $20 per month.
“Twenty bucks a month to keep my blue badge? Fuck ’em, pay me instead. If this goes through, I’m out of here,” the author of best sellers Stephen King. Elon Musk responded by suggesting $8 a month, with no apparent response from the writer.
The very idea of having to pay to have your account certified has drawn much criticism. “Appealing to Twitter users to make more money may be the right strategy, but it’s not the verification to charge for,” said Jasmine Enberg, an analyst at Inside Intelligence. “The certification is designed to guarantee the authenticity of the accounts and conversations on the platform, it is not a tool premium to improve the experience of users who access it,” he added.
*With AFP; adapted from its French version
