Elon Musk had earlier announced that he will allow users buy to a verified badge, or the Twitter Blue Tick, for a fee of $20 a month. However, after users several prominent users of Twitter who already had their accounts verified and had Twitter Blue Ticks pointed out that they would leave the platform if they were forced to pay for their verified badges, Musk announced that he would drop the price down to $8 a month.
For Elon Musk, the verified user programme is particularly important as one of his goals is to make Twitter a platform that is dominated by spam accounts and bots. He believes for that to happen, the current verified accounts programme or Twitter Blue Ticks needs to be overhauled.
While posting on Twitter about his decision to price Twitter Blue Ticks at $8 a month, Elon Musk also revealed that the price for the verified badge will be based on the purchasing power parity or PPP of the country where the user is from. Basically, someone who is based in the United States of America or any developed country, will have to pay $8 a month. However, if a verified user is based out of an underdeveloped or developing country like Zimbabwe or India, where $8 a month is actually a lot, the pricing will be lower.
Elon Musk is not just offering a blue tick next to your name in your profile for the $8 a month or so that he is going to charge. Rather, Twitter’s “new and temporary CEO” and “Complaint Hotline Operator” is offering much more.
According to Musk, people with the verified badge or the Twitter Blue Tick will be given priority in replies, mentions & searches, which will be essential to beat spam/scam accounts. This means that a person who has a verified account and is a public figure, will be given some preferential treatment so that impostors with a similar name and profile picture are not able to spam their way into mentions. People who are legitimate public figures will have the option to add a secondary tag to indicate that they indeed are public figures, a feature that is already in use by some politicians, actors and athletes.
Users with verified profiles and the Twitter Blue Tick will also get access to some niche features, such as the ability to post long video & audio content. They will also be shown about half as many ads as compared to a non-paying user, without Twitter Blue Tick.
Furthermore, Twitter will be partnering up with a few publishing houses and allow users with Twitter Blue Tick to access content that is hidden behind a paywall. The focus will mainly be towards articles for the time being, but in the future, this will be expanded to audio and video content as well.
The biggest change, however, will be for content creators on Twitter. By charging $8 a month for Twitter’s Blue Tick privileges, the platform will be able to reward content creators who create content for the platform. This means like Instagram and YouTube, Twitter too is likely to become a platform for creators who post a wide variety of content.
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