Twitter’s “Chief Twit”, Elon Musk, has announced changes are coming to the social network’s Blue subscription service.
“Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit,” said Musk just over 30 minutes ago on Tuesday. “Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.”
Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit.
Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2022
Musk says pricing will be “adjusted by country proportionate to purchasing power parity,” while also announcing other new features coming:
The Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter CEO says, “this will give Twitter a revenue stream to reward content creators.” He added, “creators need to make a living!”.
Later, Musk explained how this new service will “destroy” bots and spam on Twitter. “If a paid Blue account engages in spam/scam, that account will be suspended,” said Musk. “Essentially, this raises the cost of crime on Twitter by several orders of magnitude,” he said.
Yes, this will destroy the bots. If a paid Blue account engages in spam/scam, that account will be suspended.
Essentially, this raises the cost of crime on Twitter by several orders of magnitude.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2022
Yesterday, Musk replied to famed author Stephen King’s rant about the rumoured $20 per month price to retain Twitter’s verification checkmark status. It seems that the $20 price point ‘leaked’ to the media set high expectations, only for the real price to be revealed at far below the original cost. Clever girl.
“$20 a month to keep my blue check? Fuck that, they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron,” said King.
Musk replied, “We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?” He then added, “I will explain the rationale in longer form before this is implemented. It is the only way to defeat the bots & trolls.”
We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2022
Currently, Twitter Blue costs $6.49 CAD per month in Canada and offers features such as the ability to edit tweets, but not much more.
At $8 USD for Musk’s Twitter verification add-on and other features for Twitter Blue, conversion to CAD may come in at the $10-11 mark per month?
Would you subscribe to a Twitter Blue service at $8 USD for a verification checkmark and more features?
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Nope…
Nope. Not giving my money to Saudi Arabia.
who cares, Twitter is dead now
I won’t buy it, as I don’t post on Twitter enough to have a desire for a blue checkmark, but at least it’ll crack down on the scammers.
Scammers use free accounts.
And now they may pay to get the checkmark and scam people into believing they’re official accounts of individuals.
That doesn’t solve the problem does it? The fact Twitter had to shut it down proves it.
The blue mark was supposed to identify official accounts, but if anyone can get it it won’t mean anything anymore.
“Essentially, this raises the cost of crime on Twitter by several orders of magnitude,”
No it won’t because nobody will pay for it, spam accounts are FREE, and you won’t ban anyone for anything per your own words