Would you pay to be Twitter Verified?
Matters Opinion

Would you pay to be Twitter Verified?

Twitter’s new owner (Elon Musk) floats the idea of charging users to keep their blue checkmark

A hypothetical first-world problem that many of us un-famous peasants on Twitter probably won’t lose sleep over: Elon Musk, Twitter’s new daddy, is thinking about charging a monthly rate for those blue checkmarks verifying one’s celebrity-status on social media. 

Musk has thrown around a few prices, notably $20 and $8, and the idea came bundled with tweet, “Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit.” Though it’s hard to verify the seriousness of Elon Musk’s Twitter antics, the Tesla CEO did say that charging users for their blue checkmark would give Twitter a revenue stream to reward content creators. He added that paying users would be prioritized in terms of replies, mentions, and searches, which will sort-of thwart the efforts of fake accounts and bots.

It’s certainly not an unnatural progression for social media platforms to introduce new ways of monetizing services, but it’s hard to wrap our heads around what paying check-marked users will gain other than less scammers trying to catfish them. Even this supposed benefit is flimsy at best, as one currently-verified user wrote, “What would even be the incentive to be verified if it’s something you pay for? It would no longer be an indicator of anything other than you pay $5 a month. It only sounds desirable now because you can’t pay for it.” The scheme seemingly defeats its very purpose of disarming scammers. Another user pointed out that if imposters were willing to pay Elon’s price for a checkmark, they would simply do it.

The backlash ramped up as one of Elon’s advisors, Jason Calacanis, posted a poll on Twitter, asking how much people would be willing to pay for a blue checkmark: $5, $10, or $15 a month, or nothing. At the time of writing, nearly 2 million votes have come in, with over 80% for “wouldn’t pay”.

The most famous reaction to all of this has perhaps been from verified horror author Stephen King, who tweeted, “$20 a month to keep my blue check? Fuck that, they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.” 

trending