Elon Musk Teases With Twitter New 3-distinguished Color Verification
Twitter’s $8 monthly fee As a result of certain users creating fraudulent verified accounts and spreading false information, Twitter Blue subscription is still on hold.
Twitter usage may soon become even more colorful.
Elon Musk, the company’s new CEO, wants to add a few additional colors to the iconic blue verification badge, including a “gold check” for businesses, a “grey check” for government accounts, and the already famed “blue check” for individuals.
Musk said in a series of tweets on Black Friday that the multi-colored verification system is “tentatively starting” the following week and that all confirmed users will need to undergo a “painful, but necessary” process of human authentication.
Sorry for the delay, we’re tentatively launching Verified on Friday next week.
Gold check for companies, grey check for government, blue for individuals (celebrity or not) and all verified accounts will be manually authenticated before check activates.
Painful, but necessary.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 25, 2022
The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX clarified in the Twitter thread that, regardless of whether they are well-known accounts or celebrities, “all verified individual humans will have the same blue check,” and that more information on Twitter’s verification strategy will be provided next week.
Deliberate impersonation or fraud will lead to account suspension, Musk continued, and “we shall see how it goes.”
Twitter and Musk were unavailable for comment right away.
The numerous verification options come as Twitter has suspended its $8 per month Twitter Blue subscription service for verification after a number of users created phony verified accounts that impersonated well-known accounts and disseminated false information. These included accounts that impersonated major world leaders and media, as well as the drugmaker Eli Lilly, whose stock price crashed and erased billions in market value when a fake Eli Lilly account tweeted that the business would be handing out insulin for free.
In order to assist users in determining “which accounts we know are ‘real’ and authentic,” Twitter verification was introduced in 2009. A blue verification badge, sometimes known as a “blue check mark,” was something users could apply for for free and was given to prominent public figure accounts, including politicians, journalists, and celebrities, among other categories, while Twitter was still owned by its founder Jack Dorsey.
But Musk has made enhancing the authentication process—along with battling bot accounts—a key component of his acquisition of Twitter. Twitter therefore introduced a gray official badge earlier this month to go with its blue verified badge. However, after a few hours, Musk “killed” the proposal, stating that “Twitter will do many of idiotic things in the next months.”
Some users have started using other social media platforms that are relatively comparable to Twitter during this period of change, such as Tumblr, Mastodon, and Hive Social. It turns out that this has given other businesses called “Hive” a bit of a headache.
Following Musk’s acquisition of the platform in late October, Twitter let go of about half of its workforce, and the business is reportedly planning to let go of further Twitter employees in the sales division in the near future. The platform has also seen a number of prominent advertisers leave, prompting skeptics like novelist Stephen King to quip that “pretty soon the only sponsor left on Twitter will be MyPillow.”
