Twitter CEO Elon Musk is making the switch to paid verification in order to generate much-needed revenue for the platform.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday morning tweeted an update on the fate of legacy verified accounts on the platform. Announcing the ‘deadline’ for the removal of the blue check under Twitter’s earlier regime, Musk wrote, “Final date for removing legacy Blue checks is 4/20.”
It is not clear whether the actual date for purging of the legacy marks is a reference to April 20 or whether Musk is merely invoking the joke around 4/20, widely considered as an unofficial day to celebrate cannabis.
Earlier, Twitter had announced that it will crack down on the legacy blue ticks from April 1, allowing only paid subscribers to access the same.
Twitter Blue is priced differently for every region and based on how you sign up. In the US, it costs USD 11 a month or USD 114.99 a year for iOS or Android users and USD 8 a month or USD 84 a year for web users.
On April 2, Twitter changed the language in the description of verified users to read, “This account is verified because it’s subscribed to Twitter Blue or is a legacy verified account”. Notably, US newspaper New York Times refused to pay the verification fee after it lost the coveted badge. Musk later called the media ‘hypocritical’ for asking people to ‘pay their subscription’.
Several celebrities, including NBA star LeBron James and author Stephen King, have made known their disapproval of the Twitter Blue service.
Musk is pushing for paid verification to generate much-needed revenue for the company and termed its original verification rules as “corrupt and nonsensical.”
Twitter and its billionaire CEO have been in the news lately for a series of updates made to the platform. On Tuesday, Musk posted ‘X’ on his Twitter account, triggering speculation about the future of the company he bought for $44 billion last October. Reportedly, the microblogging platform is no longer an independent company and has now been merged with a newly formed company called X Corp.
Prior to that, Musk had temporarily changed the web blue bird logo of Twitter to the Shiba Inu mascot of the meme cryptocurrency Dogecoin, presumed to be a sarcastic take on a racketeering lawsuit which had accused him of intentionally inflating Dogecoin’s value.
