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Social networksElon Musk postpones the launch of the new Twitter subscription
The launch of the new paid Twitter subscription is postponed to November 29, after ten days of multiple controversies around the new owner’s flagship project.
“The relaunch of Blue Verified has been postponed to November 29 to make sure it is concrete,” tweeted the general manager of the social network Twitter, Elon Musk.
Prior to the Tesla boss’s acquisition of Twitter on Oct. 27, the platform offered a free identity verification service for notorious individuals and organizations on the one hand, and a paid subscription to additional options, on the other, dubbed TwitterBlue.
Elon Musk has launched a military overhaul of this subscription to add authentication, which all users will then be able to obtain regardless of their notoriety, for eight dollars a month.
The new Twitter Blue went live a week ago on iPhones to full cacophony, days after half of the company’s 7,500 employees were laid off.
Fake accounts
For 48 hours, many accounts impersonated celebrities or large companies, from LeBron James to Nintendo. Pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly had to apologize Thursday after a successful tweet from an account in his name, with the blue check mark, promising free insulin.
On Friday, the possibility to subscribe to “Twitter Blue” disappeared and an internal memo, published by some US media, says that the service has been suspended “to solve spoofing problems”.
In the system that launches on Nov. 29, “any name change will cause the blue check to be lost until the name is verified by Twitter,” Elon Musk promised on Tuesday. He also said people who don’t subscribe will lose the blue check (if they got it for free) in the next few months.
At the same time, the social network released a new gray “Official” badge for infamous accounts last Wednesday.
layoffs
Elon Musk had decreed the same day that he was removing this new label, before development product director Esther Crawford stepped in to explain that the badge would initially be reserved for governments and organizations.
The layoffs continued this week amid raucous Twitter. An engineer has been fired over a tweet from Elon Musk after he publicly questioned the claims of the flamboyant boss, who sees himself as the ultimate defender of free speech.
(AFP extension)
