Elon Musk Plans To Make Twitter Blue Subscription Mandatory for Verified Users
- Kyle Chua
- Oct 31, 2022
- 2 min read
Verified users on Twitter, be it celebrities, politicians or journalists, could soon be forced to pay a monthly fee if they want to keep the blue check marks beside their profile icons.
Elon Musk, who now owns Twitter, is reportedly planning to make the microblogging site's Blue subscription mandatory for verified users, according to The Verge. He's also considering hiking the price of the subscription from US$5 to US$20.
Twitter Blue is an optional subscription that unlocks additional features on the site, including the ability to undo tweets to fix typos, hexagonal profile icons for non-fungible tokens and a customisable navigation bar, among others. The service was launched late last year in the U.S. for US$3 but was later made more expensive to US$5.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO's plan is to give verified users a 90-day window to subscribe or lose their verified status. Meanwhile, Twitter employees, who are working on the change, were told on Sunday that they need to have it ready by 7 November or they could lose their jobs in the company.
The move is a part of Musk's plan to overhaul the site under his leadership, specifically to rid it of bots and spam accounts. "Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints," he wrote in a tweet on 29 October. "No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes." As The New York Times reports, he also ordered company-wide layoffs, asking managers to start drawing up lists of employees to cut.
A spokesperson for Twitter didn’t respond to The Verge's request for comment.
Twitter has never disclosed how many Blue subscribers there are, but, according to online data, a large portion of the company's revenue still comes from advertisements. As for verified accounts, the site has about 428,000 users with a blue check mark, which is only a tiny percentage of its 206 million daily active users.
Elon Musk, who now owns Twitter, is reportedly planning to make the microblogging site's Blue subscription mandatory for verified users.
He's also considering hiking the subscription price from US$5 to US$20.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO's plan is to give verified users a 90-day window to subscribe or lose their verified status.
