Elon Musk has said the company is ready to relaunch a verification program designed to reduce the app’s financial dependence on advertisers, but has yet to provide details.
Photos Justin Sullivan/Getty
hide captions
switch captions
Photos Justin Sullivan/Getty
Elon Musk has said the company is ready to relaunch a verification program designed to reduce the app’s financial dependence on advertisers, but has yet to provide details.
Photos Justin Sullivan/Getty
Elon Musk says he has an expected time frame to hit the market again His new payment verification system for Twitter.
“Sorry for the delay, we are scheduled to launch the Verified feature next Friday,” the struggling new CEO wrote in a tweet early Friday.
This will be his second attempt at launching a paid verification system. His first attempt earlier this month failed after users successfully impersonate companies and celebritiesincluding Lebron James, Former President George W. Bush and Musk himself.
An account impersonating pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Co. tweeted that insulin was free, sending the company’s stock plunging.
This time, Musk said, all accounts will be manually verified and color-coded for different entities.
“Yellow checks are for companies, gray checks are for governments, green checks are for individuals (celebrity or not) and all verified accounts will be manually validated before the check is activated. “, he explained in a Twitter thread.
But he still hasn’t explained how manual verification would work or if it could slow down the verification process, especially assume that more than half of Twitter’s 7,500 employees resigned or was fired since Musk bought the company about a month ago.
Verification practices for social media platforms require a “strong, agile, and large team to scale well,” says cigarette RachelCEO of Cybersecurity company SocialProof Security.
“With the workforce shrinking, it remains to be seen whether fraud, impersonation and fraud can be prevented with their new identity verification method,” she wrote in an email to NPR. “Scammers will quickly identify how they can overwhelm or manipulate the identity verification system to be ‘authenticated’ as an entity they are not.”
Twitter did not respond to a request for an interview at the time this story was published.
“Deliberate impersonation/deception will result in account suspension,” Musk tweeted Friday about the new plan. “We can see how it works.”
He also wrote that “individuals may have [a] secondary small logos indicating they belong to an organization if so verified by that organization,” promises more details next week.
Asking users to pay for verification is a cornerstone of Musk’s new plan to make Twitter profitable and less financially dependent on ad revenue. Now, half of Twitter’s top 100 advertisers no longer advertise on the site, According to a new report from the left-leaning think tank Media Matters for America.
Those 50 advertisers have spent nearly $2 billion on Twitter ads since 2020, and more than $750 million in 2022 alone.
Musk’s latest Twitter thread doesn’t mention whether his new plan is different from the original plan of charging $7.99 per month for verification.
But his announcement came in response to a Tweet from former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who criticized Musk for not understanding that “the value of a corporation lies in its workers – the their knowledge, skills, and ideas.”
“Interesting,” Musk replied. “Now pay eight dollars.”
