Twitter owner Elon Musk has mastered the art of trolling. His company has announced that accounts that have been verified before Musk took over will lose their verified check marks starting April 1 unless these accounts subscribe to Twitter Blue or the business-focused Twitter Verified Organisations plan.
April 1 is obviously April Fools’ Day. Most will think it’s a joke but Musk being, well, Musk, he may go through with the plan. For months he has been talking about how much he can earn from blue check marks. In November he said it would go away “in coming months” several times. Most of the verified accounts belong to journalists and Musk doesn’t want to have anything to do with them.
Twitter’s new paid check-mark system categorises accounts with different colours — organisations receive a gold check mark, individuals get blue and governments are noted with a grey check.
In case you are not in a hurry, wait till April 1 and see if the verification gets removed and then only decide if you want to pay.
In fact, Twitter is reportedly working on a feature to hide the blue checkmark that you may get by paying for Blue subscription. App researcher Alessandro Paluzzi shows that the company is working on a control panel for verification settings, with one of the options being “Show or hide your blue checkmark on your profile.” Not everyone wants to show a verification tag that has been bought but wants to use the other features the subscription service offers, like the power to edit tweets or the ability to put out a longer tweet. Musk has promised to make public Twitter’s decision-making process on which content to boost. He has said that accounts engaging in hateful tweets won’t have enough visibility, even if the content remains on the site. He calls this “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach”.
India pricing for Twitter Blue is substantially higher when compared to the monthly subscription fee for Netflix, Apple Music or Spotify. Per month web pricing (that is if you purchase via desktop) is Rs 650 but if you buy it through App Store or Google Play, it is Rs 900 while the annual web pricing is Rs 6,800 and annual Android/iOS pricing is Rs 9,400.