Elon Musk Wants Twitter To Charge $20/Month For People To Be Verified
Does this mean us unwashed masses can get that sacred blue checkmark if we have an Alexander Hamilton (or by 2030, a Harriet Tubman) in our pocket?
The Twitter Verification model was always pretty awful if you think about it. Anyone who is willing to verify their identity should have gotten a blue checkmark but pre-Musk Twitter only wanted to give them out to the people they deemed worthy. For example, if you could prove you were a journalist, you could get verified. But if you were a coal miner, teacher or police officer, tough shit. It's a great example of the hypocrisy of Twitter (or how Twitter used to be). On one hand, Twitter would cry about anonymous trolls but then would only let the chosen few have actual identities.
How many currently verified people are going to pay for this over the next three months? I'm sure they'll be fine removing the checkmark from the guy who covers the Metro section of the Tampa Bay Times, but will they take away the blue checkmark of Tom Hanks, the Pope or President Biden if they don't come up with twenty bucks each month? I sincerely doubt it.
The other takeaway from this report by Alex Heath is that Musk is going to fire "them all" if they can't get this up and running in a week. We've now heard weeks of rumors that Elon Musk is hellbent on firing a LOT of people at Twitter HQ. I know nothing about technology but this doesn't seem THAT difficult to implement? They already have Twitter Blue set up as a for-pay-option. Just bump the price point to $20 and tie the blue checkmark feature to it. Seems easy to me but there is a very good chance it's probably much more challenging than that and I don't know what the fuck I am talking about.
Musk has spoken before about having everyone verified on Twitter. That's basically what Facebook tries to do. You need to prove who you are to have an account. I just can't imagine Twitter doing that. You'd see such a huge decrease in members and activity if they wiped out all the burner accounts. It's the easiest way to clean out bots and trolls if people can only post with their actual names...but do the people who use Twitter want that?