Musk pushes back Twitter Blue Verified relaunch amid fears of impersonation accounts
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Musk pushes back Twitter Blue Verified relaunch amid fears of impersonation accounts
Elon Musk has announced that Blue Verified accounts won't relaunch on November 29 after all
➡️ The Shortcut Skinny: Twitter blues
📆 Elon Musk revealed the relaunch of Blue Verified has been pushed back
🤷♂️ The service that lets anyone pay $8 to be verified was supposed to return on November 29
🥸 However, Musk says the company still isn’t confident in stopping impersonation accounts from causing havoc
💛 Musk conceded that a different color checkmark for organizations may be used
Elon Musk took to Twitter to announce that the company won’t relaunch Blue Verified – which lets subscribers pay $8 a month for a checkmark – until it’s confident it can stop rogue accounts from impersonating organizations.
The relaunch for Blue Verified was supposed to take place on November 29, and Twitter has even introduced a 90-day waiting period before new accounts can sign up for a Blue membership.
However, after the disastrous launch of Blue Verified, which saw companies like insulin producer Eli Lilly get impersonated, Musk is seemingly more cautious about the impact of bad actors this time around.
Despite rolling out a second checkmark for organizations, Musk has now suggested a new checkmark color may be used to make it clearer to users which accounts are legitimate.
Will we see more colors for different types of users, like government officials? That remains to be seen, but it’s clear that Musk’s decision to grant everyone a checkmark if they’re willing to pay for it has had severe consequences and broken a system that was functioning perfectly before his $44bn takeover.
Musk still refuses to make new Twitter users provide a form of identity check, which would dramatically reduce the likelihood of bots, trolls, and scammers. He’s unlikely to budge from that decision, though, as the vast majority of social media accounts don’t require any form of user identification, partly due to privacy concerns.
Return of The Donald
Musk recently reinstated Donald Trump’s Twitter account, but the 45th President of the United States still hasn’t tweeted. Musk held a poll over whether Trump should be reinstated to Twitter, and 51.8% of the 15 million voters said ‘yes’. However, Trump recently setup up his own Twitter alternative, Truth Social, which has approximately two million users, and any activity on Musk’s platform would negatively harm his own.
Trump has said that he won’t return to Twitter because of the negative engagement and fake accounts. The Donald said, “Truth Social has been very, very powerful, very, very strong, and I’ll be staying there.”
The last month may have been a tumultuous one for Twitter, but Musk shared that the platform is currently enjoying an all-time high of daily active users. He also promised that Twitter will continue to improve when the service becomes faster to use outside of North America, Western Europe and Japan.
Musk has also recently said that Twitter is done with layoffs and is now actively hiring again, according to The Verge. The South African billionaire cut almost half of Twitter’s workforce when he first took over and even fired people publicly online for disagreeing with him. But now it appears that Musk is searching for people who are “great at writing software”.