Twitter’s new boss, Elon Musk has said the company is pausing the relaunch of its paid verification subscription service till it is confident about stopping impersonations of celebrity accounts.
Following his buyout of the social media company for $44bn last month, the Tesla chief said he would change the microblogging platform’s verification system – providing a blue tick to everyone that paid $8 and subscribed to Twitter Blue.
He had argued that adding this paid tier to Twitter would help weed out spam and fake accounts as they will not be willing to pay to get traction on the site.
Soon after the rollout of the $8 subscription service earlier this month, however, the platform descended into chaos after several users purchased verified badges and began to impersonate public personalities and organisations.
Last week, the world’s richest man and new owner of Twitter had said the platform’s $8 per month Blue subscription service would be made available again on 29 November.
“Punting relaunch of Blue Verified to November 29th to make sure that it is rock solid,” he said last week.
But in a meeting with employees on Monday, he reportedly said the paid verification subscription’s launch would be put on hold until there is “high confidence” in protecting against “significant impersonations”.
“We might launch it next week. We might not,” Musk said, according to a report by The Verge.
On Tuesday morning, November 22, Musk confirmed the report.
“Holding off relaunch of Blue Verified until there is high confidence of stopping impersonation,” the Tesla CEO tweeted.
Musk, in his tweet, also said Twitter may use a “different colour check” to verify organisations.
