Twitter to Launch Gold And Grey Verification Ticks Alongside Blue – Elon Musk has stated that Twitter verification will return with color-coded categories for individuals, government accounts, and businesses next week. Twitter’s new owner has announced that the platform will launch a new verification service on Friday of the next week, having scrapped a previous attempt that gave blue ticks to accounts paying $7.99 per month after it triggered a flood of fake accounts.
Musk stated that verified accounts under the new system would be marked with a blue tick – or checkmark – for individuals, a grey tick for “government,” and a gold tick for businesses. Additionally, he stated that every verified account would be “manually authenticated.” He did not specify if there would be a fee for any of the new checkmarks, as there was during the previous overhaul of verification. More than 400,000 Twitter accounts currently have blue ticks, which designate them as authentic sources and are typically awarded to prominent accounts such as those of celebrities, politicians, journalists, government departments, and major corporations.
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Musk stated that the new blue tick would be for all users, “celebrity or not,” and that users could have a secondary “tiny” logo verifying their membership in an organization if that organization verified them. Next week, he will provide a more thorough explanation, he said. His previous attempt to overhaul verification, which he believes is necessary to reduce annoying automated accounts on the platform and generate much-needed revenue through subscriptions, was halted earlier this month when it resulted in an eruption of fake accounts.
Twitter Blue was relaunched earlier this month, charging $7.99 for a blue tick, but users seized the opportunity to impersonate companies such as Eli Lilly and Tesla for less than $10. The redesign was abandoned shortly thereafter. Omnicom, a major advertising agency, cited the issue of impersonation as one of the reasons its clients should suspend Twitter advertising. Before the botched relaunch of Blue, Bloomberg reported in early November that government entities would not be charged for verification.
According to Twitter’s most recent quarterly results, it has nearly 238 million daily users, but since Musk’s $44bn acquisition, that number has surpassed 250 million and user growth rates have reached “all-time highs,” as reported by The Verge, a technology news website. Musk announced the verification change while paving the way for the return of banned accounts to the platform the following week. He announced that suspended accounts would be granted “general amnesty” if they had not violated the law or “engaged in egregious spam.”
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Musk has acknowledged that Twitter has experienced a “massive” decline in advertising revenue as a result of concerns regarding his plans for moderating content on the platform, including the fate of banned accounts. In order to “survive the upcoming economic downturn,” he has informed Twitter employees that roughly half of the platform’s revenue must come from subscriptions. According to Twitter’s most recent annual report, 90% of its $5.1 billion in revenues came from advertising.
