Days after Twitter suspended its new verification scheme which allows anyone to buy a blue check mark, the microblogging platform's new owner, Elon Musk, said that the Twitter Blue subscription will probably be back by the end of this week.
This comes days after Twitter's $8 blue tick subscription wiped out billions of dollars from Eli Lilly and Lockheed Martin's market cap after their official Twitter handles were impersonated to spread disinformation. On November 11, US pharma giant Eli Lilly apologised for a misleading tweet from a fake Eli Lilly account which said, "We are excited to announce insulin is free now." Another verified handle, impersonating Lockheed Martin's Twitter account, said that the company will begin halting all weapon sales to Saudi Arabia, Israel and the U.S. for alleged human rights abuses. Both the companies lost billions in market cap last week.
To deal with fake verified accounts, Musk said that Twitter will soon enable organisations to identify which other Twitter accounts are actually associated with them.
"We will enable organizations to manage affiliations," he said, adding that increasing granularity about what "verified" actually means is the right move.
To identify parody accounts, Musk earlier said that accounts engaged in parody must include "parody" in their name, not just in bio. "To be more precise, accounts doing parody impersonations. Basically, tricking people is not ok," Musk said.
Musk also apologised for Twitter being super slow in many countries. "App is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!" he wrote on Twitter.
Last week, Twitter rolled out its Blue service in India, including the famed Blue checkmark and a host of other features, for ₹719 per month. Twitter India users received pop-ups on their Apple App Store, asking them to buy the newly launched service.
At ₹719 (around $8.8), the feature turns out to be more expensive in India than the developed economies, where it's priced $8 per month. This is contrary to what Twitter's new chief Elon Musk had promised earlier. Musk had earlier said that 'Blue' subscription will not be the same across countries and that the price will be adjusted by country proportionate to "purchasing power parity".
Besides the verification checkmark, Twitter Blue offers a host of other features like fewer ads, the option to post longer videos and priority ranking for quality content. Features like better news reading experience, and early access to select new features and extras like the option to choose app icons are also added to it.
