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Just days after “Chief Twit” Elon Musk took over Twitter, the social media giant is apparently unveiling a brand new plan that will charge subscribers a monthly fee of around $20 to keep their verification badges.
According to The Verge, which cited sources familiar with the situation, the social media business is planning to transform its $5 monthly subscription service Twitter Blue into a more expensive one that also validates consumers.
Twitter Blue with verification might cost up to $20 under the new strategy.
“The entire verification procedure is now being redone,” Twitter’s new CEO, Mr Musk, tweeted on Monday in response to a user on the microblogging platform.
Twitter officials are said to have spent the weekend debating changes to the social media network.
Users may have to pay to subscribe to Twitter Blue or risk losing their badges, according to Casey Newton, a former editor for The Verge, in his website Platformer, citing individuals close to the topic.
The subscription service, which debuted last year, now costs $4.99 and is only available in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and provides customers with a slew of new features such as the ability to undo or bookmark tweets, as well as a “reader mode” to view lengthy threads of posts.
Following Mr Musk’s pronouncements regarding free speech and open debate on the network, some reports have raised fear that Twitter’s content monitoring would be reduced.
On Friday, he stated that major content material decisions or account reinstatements would not take place until a new “content moderation committee with broadly different opinions” met.
A New York Times report also claimed that Mr Musk was preparing major layoffs at the company, including managers and engineers who had not recently contributed to the platform’s code base.
The “Chief Twit” dismissed the claim on Monday, calling it “fake,” but had previously informed possible investors in his plan to purchase Twitter that he intended to reduce the company’s workforce from around 7,500 to little over 2,000.
