Billionaire Elon Musk took over as owner and CEO of Twitter last week following a long saga between himself and the company. Now that he’s in charge of the social network, one of his first orders was to completely revamp the account verification program. On Tuesday, Musk confirmed that anyone will be able to get a “blue checkmark” plus some other benefits for $8 a month.
Twitter Verification will now be available as a paid subscription
Musk’s plans to charge for account verification through Twitter Blue subscription were first revealed by a report on Monday. However, the report claimed that it would cost users $20 per month. In a new tweet on his personal account, Twitter’s new CEO confirmed that verification and other Twitter Blue benefits will cost $8 per month.
Twitter’s verification program is currently restricted to public people such as celebrities, creators, journalists, and politicians. However, Musk has always been against this idea, as he believes that all users should be able to verify their accounts as legitimate.
In the same tweet, Musk criticized the current program calling it a “lords & peasants system.” He also revealed that in addition to the blue checkmark, Twitter Blue subscribers will also have priority in replies and search to “defeat spam,” as well as the ability to post long videos and audios. Blue subscribers will also see significantly less ads on Twitter, according to Musk.
One of the concerns about the change in Twitter’s verification program is that the Blue subscription is only available in a few countries. While Musk didn’t provide details about expanding it to more regions, he did confirm that the price will be adjusted proportionally by country to ensure “purchasing power parity.”
Elon Musk wants to change everything on Twitter
Since Musk took over as CEO of Twitter, there’s a lot going on at the company. For instance, Twitter is going back to being a private company with no shareholders or board of directors. He has also fired top executives from the company, including former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and CFO Ned Segal.
As the new CEO, Musk has also ordered managers to work for 12 hours a day, suspended the social network’s moderation policies, and discontinued Twitter Blue’s ad-free articles. He has also been threatening to lay off half of the employees to get them to agree to his demands, which also include making engineers show him the codes they have been working on.
As for the Twitter Blue subscription changes, it’s unclear when they will be made available to the public.
