Elon Musk and the board at Twitter came to an agreement on the sale of the social media company on 25 April 2022, this was reported to be for a price that marked a 38% premium over the stock price at the time. The report further mentioned that Elon said, “Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”
Buying Twitter was a bold move for Elon Musk that didn’t come cheap, he spent roughly $44 billion and as he constantly talks about in his tweets, there’s reportedly a “bot problem” on the app, so it sounds like he has a lot of work to do to get it to a profitable stage.
Elon Musk took over operations at Twitter and one of the first new features was subscription-based verification, as opposed to the notable or recognized verification standard. This is being incorporated into the already existing Twitter Blue subscription feature that previously had nothing to do with having a verified check. The verification check previously indicated that Twitter had verified the accounts of artists, athletes, government officials and agencies and other reputable public figures.
I know a bit about the standard process as I tried to request verification under the previous administration and one of the requirements was to send in 3 notable media publications that verified me and since I couldn’t provide that, no verified check mark for me. But Elon Musk changed that with the new option that allows users pay to be verified, among other premium benefits of the subscription are, the ability to post longer videos, edit tweets, see half the ads and more.
This subscription-based verification feature was reportedly going to cost $19.99 per month but after series of backlash and criticism, the social media company decided to charge $8.00 per month for their subscription service. This was still met with some resistance but according to Elon Musk, this will also give Twitter a revenue stream to reward content creators.
In more recent news, Meta, an American multinational technology conglomerate and the parent company of social media platforms Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, announced a regional roll out a subscription-based verification feature for its Facebook and Instagram platforms. This would allow users verify their identity using a government ID card and according to their CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, this new feature called ‘Meta Verified’ would grant subscribers access to a blue verified badge, extra impersonation protection against accounts claiming to be you, and get direct access to customer support. Meta Verified is proposed to cost $11.99 per month on the web and $14.99 per month on iOS. The regional roll out will begin in Australia and New Zealand with more countries to follow.
This is a good direction in identity verification for large organizations and reputable people who make use of these platforms, to help curb the various discrepancies that come with using social media.
