Twitter Hates Musk's New Move

Elon Musk is removing the well-known blue checkmark on April 1, but Twitter users dislike the idea.

Twitter's latest move to drum up cash is not getting the reaction that its CEO Elon Musk was seeking.

The social media company announced that it will remove legacy verified checkmarks on April 1. Twitter users can only regain the infamous blue checkmark that was granted to businesses, CEOs, media, athletes and celebrities by paying $8 a month via Twitter Blue.

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The responses were overwhelmingly negative.

Brian Altano, a supervising producer, writer and video host who has a legacy verified account, is opposed to the idea.

"Nah I'm good, thanks. Good luck with all the debt, though!" he tweeted.

Twitter Blue Failed Last November

When Musk launched the idea back in November thousands of imposter accounts popped up overnight, causing chaos and major problems, especially for public companies. 

Musk reversed the idea quickly and suspended signups on Nov. 11, just two days after the launch of the new version of Blue, which integrates a checkmark for authenticating the identity of the people behind an account.

Within hours after Blue rolled out on Nov. 9, many fake accounts posing as companies and celebrities appeared on the platform. These accounts had been authenticated with the blue check mark, but they were impersonators.

Tesla's (TSLA) - Get Free Report fake account, for example, posted jokes about the vehicle maker's safety record. A fake Eli Lilly (LLY) - Get Free Report account posted that insulin was now free. The pharmaceutical giant had to apologize.

Another fake account from defense group Lockheed Martin (LMT) - Get Free Report sent a message saying: "We will begin halting all weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the United States, until further investigation into their record of human rights abuses."

Advertisers fled in droves, fed up with the problems that were multiplying after Musk acquired Twitter on Oct. 27 for $44 billion. But the billionaire needed to ramp up revenue quickly since he incurred $13 billion in debt when the deal closed. 

Musk, who had never run a social media company before the acquisition, removed the safeguards limiting the spread of misinformation, racism and antisemitism as well as hateful content on Twitter.

This laissez-faire approach is part of Musk's defense of free speech. But his strategy has transformed Twitter into a bastion for conservatives, who come together to denounce what Musk has described as the woke mind virus. This expression is a catch-all for progressive values. Twitter has thus become the battleground for the conservative culture war.

After the launch failed, Musk initially left the official badge in the bios of high-profile accounts like institutions, celebrities and brands. The billionaire then announced that he had killed this feature. 

But faced with a flood of impersonators and the mass withdrawal of brands, which have suspended the promotion of their products and services on the platform, Musk brought back the grey tag.

That was not enough to discourage the impersonators. The serial entrepreneur finally decided to suspend new signups for Twitter Blue.

Musk was planning to relaunch Blue on Nov. 29, but ultimately Twitter decided to relaunch a new bug-fixed version of Blue on Dec. 12 -- but with a tweak for iPhone users.

Users will again be able to subscribe to Blue for $7.99 a month -- but the price will be $11 for iPhone owners unless they subscribe on the web and not through the App Store. The price for businesses and organizations is $1,000 per month.

Blue has not been popular and has not drawn many subscribers. Only 180,000 accounts in the U.S. have paid for it through mid-January, which is less than 0.2% of monthly active users, according to The Information, which cited a document it viewed. 

Twitter Users Not Fans 

Ford Fischer, a documentary filmmaker and editor-in-chief of News2Share, said he paid for Twitter Blue because "legacy checkmarks need to be vastly more accessible, and were inequitably granted."

Twitter will not be useful if "if imposter accounts are indistinguishable before," he tweeted. 

The social media platform is popular because anyone can respond to a tweet or receive a response from someone that is well-known such as the media, athletes, actors and even politicians.

"One big thing people love about Twitter is how accessible it makes public figures (journalists, politicians, celebrities, athletes) to the PUBLIC. Those sorts of conversations will be really less valuable if users have no idea about the authenticity of accounts," Fischer said.

Traffic on Twitter Could Fall

Social media companies track how long users are on their platform. Twitter could lose engagement because people go to another website to confirm the identity of a Twitter account. 

"There’s an irony to this @elonmusk appears to be missing: When someone wants to confirm that a profile of a public person is actually them, absent the checkmark, there’s one thing for them to do: Go to a third party website that lists it. This will drive traffic off Twitter," he wrote.

Engagement on Twitter could also decline rapidly as users get frustrated with attempting to verify accounts themselves.

Don Moynihan, a policy professor at Georgetown University, said the new change only encourages more false information being tweeted.

"Losing the blue check removes one more barrier to impersonation and misinformation," he wrote.

Twitter users are adamant in their refusal to pay for the once coveted blue checkmark.

Megan Kelley Hall, a writer who added "will not pay 4 blue check" to her Twitter bio, tweeted, "You DO realize that if you give everyone a checkmark, NO ONE will pay for a stupid checkmark. Why don’t you allow people who use their real identities to keep their blue checks? Otherwise, you’re gonna have hundreds of Elons on this dying platform. Good luck with that."

The move by Musk will only decrease the authority that diverse voices gained by having the legacy blue checkmark, said Laura Fitton, author of Twitter for Dummies. 

"What’s even sadder… this new wave of commoditizing and devaluing it takes hard earned presence, and authority away from diverse voices that worked hard to serve their audiences here by speaking truth to power that chilling effect is the likely actual reason for the changes," she tweeted.

How to obtain the blue checkmark was the most common question she received for over a decade.

"As Twitter for @Dummies author and (volunteer) Twitter evangelist it was the top question I got for like a decade the blue check was available for sale to executives of companies that bought enough Twitter ads at least as far back as 2012-2014 it’s sad it came to mean 'status,' she tweeted.