Twitter Will Charge $8 For Account Verification, Says Musk

Elon Musk on Tuesday announced that account verification on social media platform Twitter will cost users USD 8 per month, bringing it down from the previously planned USD 20 subscription fee for the coveted blue checkmark.

He further said the price would also be subject to a country’s “purchasing power parity”. 

Musk believes that adding a subscription price on the account verification will help the social media platform sustain itself on the long run, in addition to generating revenues from advertisements. 

Making the announcement of USD 8 per month charge for the blue checkmark, he also added that the users will get additional features now including priority in replies, mentions and search, ability to post long video and audio and half as many ads.

The blue checkmark on Twitter so far has meant that the social media platform had confirmed and verified that a particular account belonged to a person/company claiming it. This feature has been free for most users till now.

Musk said that the blue checkmark will also have something new – “a secondary tag below the name for someone who is a public figure, which is already the case for politicians.”

Twitter will also offer paywall bypass for publishers willing to work with the platform.

Newly the CEO of Twitter after the takeover, Musk has been of the opinion that introducing a fee for the blue checkmark would help mitigate the problems the social network has with spam and bots.

“Yes, this will destroy the bots. If a paid Blue account engages in spam/scam, that account will be suspended. Essentially, this raises the cost of crime on Twitter by several orders of magnitude,” Musk tweeted.

Earlier on Tuesday, Elon Musk in a Twitter interaction asked noted writer Stephen King if he would be willing to pay USD 8 instead of previously planned USD 20 for account verification, after the latter had threatened to leave the social media platform if the charge was introduced.

The consideration of charges for account verification on Twitter was criticised world over.   

In his tweet, noted entrepreneur and CRED Founder Kunal Shah wrote, “If blue ticks become a commodity and lose its signaling status, follower count will become alternate signaling status. Those with followers from populous nations will have unfair advantage of this new signaling.” 

Earlier tweets from Shah said introducing a fee for the account verification could result in “[..] chaos. But maybe that’s what the end goal is.”

Last week, Twitter’s advertising head, Sarah Personette, had announced that she had resigned from her role.