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What Does Musk Really Want to Do About Twitter? On the Impact of Twitter Blue, Vine, and Other Short-Form Video Service Providers

According to Musk, the company that cut half of its staff would manually verify all accounts before approving their check mark. The company will also temporarily remove check marks pending authentication if verified users change their account names. It is not clear what the process will involve beyond verification that users have a functional phone number. Crawford said that they don’t have ID verification in the update.

Musk risked alienating many advertisers who still make up the majority of its sales by trying to use the paid verification option. Eli Lilly and Nintendo of America had their accounts impersonated, after the paid verification option was launched last month.

Musk fired his top execs at the same time as he moved quickly to shake it up. In tweets over the weekend, Musk polled his followers about whether to bring back Vine, Twitter’s defunct short-form video service, and said “absolutely” in response to a user’s suggestion to rethink the platform’s character limits. It is not known how committed Musk is to any of these changes.

With that said, it’s hard to ignore the parallels between Meta’s new checkmark subscription and Twitter Blue, which Musk just relaunched months ago. It seems like Meta’s taking account authenticity a bit more seriously, however, as it still requires users to submit government IDs (like the old Twitter verification process did) and supposedly offers additional safeguards against fake accounts, although we still don’t know what those are. Let’s just hope it won’t cause the flood of fake verified accounts we saw on Twitter last year.

Musk, who previously said he wants to “defeat the spam bots,” made the prevalence of spam and fake accounts on Twitter central to his effort to get out of the deal, before reversing course earlier this month and moving forward with the acquisition.

One warning: If you decide to sign up for Twitter Blue and care to retain your check mark, lock in your Twitter handle, display name, and photo prior to signing up. If someone changes your profile information, the site may remove your check mark for a short period of time. This may be the case because Musk dislikes accounts that impersonate him on his platform.

The blue check system wasn’t a cure-all for fraud, lies, and other misinformation—Twitter’s long history of content moderation problems is well documented, plus it made a number of missteps deciding who and why to verify over the years—but verification did help the platform operate as a “town square” for sharing information. Facebook and TikTok were the first major social platform to include blue badges for their own networks. They have been at least moderately helpful.

One day after the platform launched an updated version of itsiOS app that promised to allow users who pay a monthly subscription fee to get a blue checkmark on their profiles, the platform decided to push back the new feature.

Impersonating a Micro-Blogging Account without Verifying ‘Parody’: After Musk’s Twitter Suspension Deceleration, Silverman Suggests the Use of Twitter Blue

On Sunday, Musk said that any handles engaging in impersonation without specifying ‘parody’ will be permanently suspended. There is a chance of a temporary loss of the verified checkmark with a name change on the micro-blogging site.

I believe in a freedom of speech. and I eat doody for breakfast every day,” Silverman tweeted Saturday. Her account is also supporting democrats.

After visiting the account, visitors were warned that there was some unusual activity coming from it, and that they had to click through to the profile. The comedian then put her name and image on her account again.

The blue checkmark was just meant to signify that your identity was verified, and it was also the reason why television actress Valerie Bertinelli changed her name to the CEO’s. It would be hard for scammers to impersonate you. That no longer applies. Good luck out there! She then answered a follower who asked how the checkmark no longer applies, writing, “[y]ou can buy a blue check mark for $7.99 a month without verifying who you are.”

After changing her profile name to Musk, she supported a number of Democrats and encouraged people to vote.

Additionally, Musk said Twitter users will no longer receive warning before being suspended. “This will be clearly identified as a condition for signing up to Twitter Blue,” he tweeted.

In recent months, Musk has shared conspiracy theories about the attack on Paul Pelosi, called Democrats the party of “division & hate,” compared Twitter’s former CEO to Joseph Stalin and warned that “the woke mind virus will destroy civilization.”

Within minutes, multiple Twitter accounts claiming to be Kenya Airways tweeted him. All of them offered help, but none of them appeared official. The accounts used a logo and slogan that raised red flags. “Most of their messages were well crafted,” Murphy says. The main problem was the lack of followers coupled with their spelling errors or odd choices of characters. The accounts included “@_1KenyaAirways” and “@kenyaairways23.”

“Cybercriminals very easily use social media as the perfect vehicle to target unbeknown victims, but when there is no clear and genuine way to check identities, you open up a path to impersonated accounts, which will no doubt be abused by threat actors in the search of a con,” says Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at security firm ESET.

Twitter Blue: Where Are We Going? Musk’s Chaotic Twitter Regime and its Impact on the Company’s Integrated Ad Advertising Strategy

The company says the revamped service will cost $8 a month on the web, or $11 a month if purchased through an app on iPhones and iPads, where in-app transactions are processed through the company’s App Store, which generally levies a 30% commission.

The price new tiers followed the words from Musk over the Apple tax, which has been viewed by regulators around the world as excessive and financially damaging to Apple’s rivals. Musk has since claimed his row with Apple was resolved following a meeting with the company’s chief executive, Tim Cook at the company’s Cupertino headquarters.

Musk now says there will be three colors for purchase: gold for companies; grey for governments and a blue check for prominent individuals, including celebrities.

Musk views Twitter Blue as part of his mission to make money on the platform in ways other than advertising, which accounts for about 90% of Twitter’s revenue. Major advertisers are leaving in droves because of Musk’s chaotic reign.

The company has long struggled to grow its service the way larger competitors like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok have and, even before Musk took over, the company’s advertising business had been far from robust.

Twitter has not answered questions about whether it still has the resources to take on such a daunting task after laying off more than half of the company’s staff.

The CEO of the cybersecurity firm SocialProof Security said it was not certain if it would be possible to prevent fraud with a reduced workforce. “SCAMmers will be quick to figure out how they can overwhelm or manipulate the identity verification system to get ‘authenticated’ as an entity that they are not”

What is the price of a phone number? How much does it cost to register for a smartphone app? What are the different colored check marks?

If your account is eligible, you need to check your phone number to make sure it’s the right one. If you sign up through the iPad store, it will cost you $8 per month, while if you use the web browser, it will cost you $11 per month. This price difference is common for the App Store and similar for YouTube Music, both of which raise their prices.

There is a new note on the blue checks of accounts that were verified before Musk was in charge. It may or may not be significant.

Musk initially said the relaunch of the new system would take place at the end of November, but it was delayed several times over concerns about the safety of the feature.

The additional gold and gray verification categories appear aimed at addressing some of those concerns, but it’s not clear what a requirement for individuals to pay to be verified would mean for trust in prominent individual users.

Musk said last month that verified individual humans would have the same blue check. Individuals can have a secondary tiny logo if they are found to belong to an org.

Not sure what exactly you receive for that monthly subscription? Are you confused as to what all the different colored check marks mean? Here’s everything you need to know.

How Do You Get Your Tweet? Show Me Your Twitter Profile Picture, Or Why You Shouldn’t Have to Wait until You’ve Just Posted

What do you get right now? You instantly get the ability to edit your Tweets multiple times within the first half-hour of posting, a long-requested feature. While you will need to wait for longer videos, Twitter Blue subscribers can upload video files at 1080p quality. Are you still holding on to that bored ape, crazy kitty, loudmouth larva, or whatever the latest NFT collection is? Show it off as your profile picture with Twitter Blue.

The new service will let you change your experience. The icon on your phone may be different or the colors may be different. For anyone who bookmarks an overwhelming assortment of Tweets, you can now sort through those bookmarked posts and organize them into private folders.

Users may begin to see some gray or gold check marks on accounts. There are two ways to say gold is for a business account and gray is for a government account.

Are you still sure that you want to be on social media? Anyone wanting something new can consider WIRED’s articles about Mastodon and other alternative options that help them get started, or if they prefer they can consider giving LinkedIn a second chance.

The company is testing the service with “a select group of businesses,” including its own employees. Esther Crawford, director of product management at Twitter, has a little bird badge next to her blue checkmark that verifies her as an employee at the company, as you can see in this tweet of her announcing Blue for Business. CraftVentures, a venture capital firm, also has some employees marked with a badges using its logo.

We dug into the rounded square profile pictures and affiliate badges, which started appearing earlier on Monday, before the announcement.

The Meta Verified Service: Evolving the Meaning of the Blue Badge to Ensure Public Authenticity and Increase Access to Verification

“Meta Verified” will start at $11.99 a month on the web or $14.99 a month on iOS, and the company will begin releasing it in Australia and New Zealand this week and “more countries soon.”

If you want to get the blue Badge, you need to provide a government ID which matches your profile name and picture, because it’s necessary to avoid fake accounts. Users must also be above 18 to be eligible.

The accounts that are already verified will not be changed. Verification was previously for users who are “authentic and notable.”

“We are evolving the meaning of the blue badge to focus on authenticity so we can expand verification access to more people,” a Meta spokesperson said. “We will display follower count in more places so people can distinguish which accounts are notable public figures among accounts that share the same name.”

If you sign up for the service, you will be given exclusive Stickers for Stories and Reels and receive 100 free stars per month, or the digital Currency you can use to tip creators on Facebook. You can not change your profile name or photo, unless you apply for a Meta Badge, and businesses can’t do that until the verification process is complete.

Meta writes in a post that they want to build a subscription offering that is valuable to everyone, from creators to businesses. “As part of this vision, we are evolving the meaning of the verified badge so we can expand access to verification and more people can trust the accounts they interact with are authentic.”

Rumors about the service first surfaced earlier this month when a report from TechCrunch shared references to paid verification in Instagram’s source code. Matt Navarra, a consultant to social media companies, later posted a support page for paid verification on either the Australian or New Zealand version of the photo-sharing app.