To stop blue check mark abuse, Twitter won’t let accounts less than 90 days old sign up for its Blue subscription service when it relaunches on November 29 (fingers crossed), according to an update to the About Twitter Blue page.
“Newly created Twitter accounts will not be able to subscribe to Twitter Blue for 90 days. We may also impose waiting periods for new accounts in the future in our discretion without notice,” reads the About Twitter Blue page.
The restriction will limit people from creating new accounts just for pretending to be someone else and the company hopefully won’t have to worry for a few months about the $7.99 verification abuse. There will also be other policies to check abuse. Twitter CEO Elon Musk has said that changing your verified name will make you lose your check mark until Twitter confirms your new name doesn’t violate its terms of service. Those creating a parody account have to mention ‘parody’ in the name.
But one’s unsure if the system can handle someone who changes their name and handle after 90 days but before signing up for Twitter Blue.
An equally serious issue at hand is how the platform will tackle FIFA World Cup, an event that’s expected to produce big global traffic. It will be a test of the site’s reliability while the engineering team has to ensure that crucial services stay up.
Musk’s latest emails are not helping employee morale. A pair of new emails mention: “Regarding remote work, all that is required for approval is that your manager takes responsibility for ensuring that you are making an excellent contribution. It is also expected that you have in-person meetings with your colleagues on a reasonable cadence, ideally weekly, but not less than once per month.”
Then comes the threatening note: “At the risk of stating the obvious, any manager who falsely claims that someone reporting to them is doing excellent work or that a given role is essential, whether remote or not, will be exited from the company.”
Among Musk’s early moves after taking over as CEO has been to reverse the company’s previous “work from home forever” policy, which had been enacted by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Twitter as already cut half of the company’s full-time workforce or roughly 3,700 jobs (besides a large pool of contractors). The new emails may see the exit of more employees.