On Saturday, Twitter launched a subscription service for $7.99 a month that includes a blue check now given to verified accounts as new owner Elon Musk overhauls the platform’s verification system just ahead of the U.S. midterm elections.
A Twitter headquarters sign is shown in San Francisco, Friday, Nov. 4, 2022.
The change represents the end of Twitter’s current verification system, which was launched in 2009 to prevent impersonations of high-profile accounts such as celebrities and politicians. Before the overhaul, Twitter had about 423,000 verified accounts, many of them rank-and-file journalists from around the globe that the company verified regardless of how many followers they had.
President Joe Biden’s @POTUS account, for example, says in gray letters it belongs to an “United States government official.” He said the company’s front-line content moderation staff was the group the least affected by the job cuts and that “efforts on election integrity — including harmful misinformation that can suppress the vote and combatting state-backed information operations — remain a top priority.”
Meanwhile, Twitter has already seen “a massive drop in revenue” because of pressure from activist groups on advertisers to get off the platform, Musk tweeted Friday. That hits Twitter hard because of its heavy reliance so far on advertising to make money. During the first six months of this year, nearly $92 of every $100 it made in revenue came from advertising.
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