The user accused Twitter of aggressively asking $1000 for business verification
Twitter, a social media platform has been in news for quite some time now. It was bought by the second wealthiest person (according to both the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes’s real-time billionaire’s list) Elon Musk on October 27, 2022, where he held the title of owner and CEO of the platform. His purpose in buying the company was to provide free speech to all the users.
Musk stated while explaining his act towards the help of humanity that free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where important affairs of the future of humanity are debated.
After acquiring the platform, he fired half of the staff, formed a ‘content moderation council’ that would review the account statements and revamped the platform’s subscription service. Twitter launched a new version of the subscription service, Twitter Blue, that allows users to be verified at the price of $8. Previously, the company verified celebrities, politicians, journalists and prominent figures to prevent impersonation. The verification is done on a case-to-case basis. Twitter’s policy for imposters is to permanently suspend those accounts except if they have a clear demarcation of being a parody account.
The revamping of subscription-based plans have been rolled out first on November 22. Twitter blue was the initiation of the programme and now extends to grey and golden badges as well. Any individual who can pay a monthly subscription price of $8(for Android users) or $11 (for iOS users) becomes eligible for the blue badge. And now as reports say, Twitter has started to give gold badges to businesses for $1000. The grey badge would be representing government agencies using the micro-blogging platform.
Twitter has been reportedly been emailing businesses to sign up for its organisation plans that would get them a gold badge in exchange for a monthly subscription. The associates would also be getting validations along with the firm. This offer, as said, only applies to early access users which specifically extends to affiliation badges for company associates. Although there has been no official announcement from Twitter.
Matt Navarra, a social media consultant sharing a screenshot of an email from the micro-blogging platform tweeted that Twitter is allegedly emailing certain business organisations offering gold check mark verification at the subscription price of $1000 for every month. And the associate’s account is to be affiliated at the additional price of $50.
Musk said justifying the steps taken by him and rolling out its subscription plan that the previous 3 months have been extremely tough, and he had to save Twitter from bankruptcy while fulfilling his essential Tesla & SpaceX duties. He strongly conveyed that he won’t wish anyone else to go through the pain he has experienced in that time frame.
Since Twitter opened its door to users for subscribing to the blue badge, only 0.2% of total active users comprises almost 180,000 people, out of which only 62% reside in the United States of America. To get back on a profitable track business, the micro-blogging site has decided to go for the subscription-based model.
The acquisition of Twitter by Elon has been anything but smooth. He immediately fired half of the staff, including Parag Agarwal, the then-CEO. He chose the method of over-scrutiny of records and the current working of the site. He also worked constantly on improving the user interface easing the interactions since Twitter is a social media site that allows its user to micro-blog their ideas.
The friction between the new CEO and employees was much evident and stayed in news for weeks. As for now, there has been no official statement released by the platform clarifying its stand on the matter. It was expected to announce new plans and strategies the following week. There is not much hope that users are in place to welcome the changes.
edited and proofread by nikita sharma
