Elon Musk seems to have confirmed his plan to charge Twitter users for account verification. He even reduced the price – he’s going to charge $8 instead of the $20 monthly charge. “Twitter’s current lords and peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is “bullshit”. Power to the people! Blue for $8/month,” Musk tweeted yesterday.
Twitter Blue is a $4.99-a-month service that offers the Undo Tweet option and other features, and on Sunday Elon Musk ordered employees to raise the price of Twitter Blue to $19.99 and mandate verified accounts to subscribe if they want to keep their blue verification checkmarks.
In an interview, Elon Musk explained that he thinks his plan will “destroy the bots,” because “if a paid Blue account engages in spam/scam, they will be suspended.” He said that this would raise the cost of crime on Twitter by “several orders of magnitude.” Musk also said Twitter would start using a secondary tag below accounts for the public, which is already true for politicians.
$8 is initially set as default by country, proportionate to purchasing power parity. The new Twitter Blue will provide many improvements including the ability to post long videos and audio, half as many ads, and a new revenue stream for publishers.
On Monday, Musk-led Twitter removed a useful feature from its prototype “Twitter Blue.” Previously, ad-free articles were available through Twitter Blue; now users can no longer access that.
