Elon Musk sees certification as a Twitter Blue membership perk

A Twitter Blue subscription could become mandatory for certification, with the latter priced up to $20 per month.

With Elon Musk in the big boss chair, Twitter plans to raise the price of its Blue subscription from $5 to $20 a month and make it mandatory for certified users. At least that’s what Casey Newton of Platformer and The Verge says. If this information is confirmed, certified users – whether they be celebrities, politicians, journalists or anyone else – will have to subscribe to the service within 90 days, otherwise they will lose the small blue check mark next to their pseudonym. Employees working on the project were reportedly told they would be fired if they didn’t make these changes by November 7th.

Twitter Blue subscription may become mandatory for certification

Last year, Twitter launched a Blue subscription in the US for $3 per month, but the rate increased to $5 last July. This service offers subscribers a number of features, such as customizable icons or, more recently, the ability to edit tweets. The company did not disclose the number of Blue’s current subscribers, the revenue generated by the service, or any other details about it, but the vast majority of the company’s revenue (89%) still comes from advertising, according to Investopedia.

and the price of the latter will increase to $20 per month

Elon Musk announced the change just recently, tweeting that “the entire review process is now in progress.”As Casey Newton points out, the @verified Twitter account currently tracks 428,000 little blue check accounts, which is a fairly small fraction of its 206 million daily active users.

And many of these people have tweeted about this development. Most of them don’t want to shell out $20 to verify their account status. And at the same time, some users report that this new system could increase the bot and spam problems that Elon Musk hates online. “The point of Twitter certification is to be useful in verifying that claims are coming from them,” cosmologist and author Kathy Mack tweeted. “It should help fight misinformation, not be a status symbol.”

Elon Musk has been very busy the last few days as the “chief jerk”. According to The New York Times, he has already demanded a large number of layoffs. The boss of SpaceX and Tesla finally ordered his managers to start preparing lists of employees to be laid off.