Twitter last week announced that legacy ‘Twitter Blue’ verified checkmarks will be removed from user names starting April 1, unless users decide to pay for the subscription, priced at Rs 650 per month on the Web, or Rs 900 per month on Android or iOS. CEO Elon Musk has been defending the paid Twitter Blue plans quite regularly of late, and on Monday, Musk claimed that paid-account social media will be the only kind “that matters.”
Musk tweeted that any modern artificial intelligence (AI) tool has the ability to clear any given “prove you’re not a robot” test. The billionaire entrepreneur added that when paid verification is introduced on any platform, bot cost will increase by nearly 10,000 per cent, making it much easier to “identify bots by phone and CC clustering [contrastive clustering].”
Hence, Musk noted that “paid-account social media will be the only media that matters.”
On Sunday, “Star Trek” actor William Shatner tagged Musk in a tweet saying, “I’ve been here for 15 years giving my time and witty thoughts… Now you’re telling me that I have to pay for something you gave me for free?”
To Shatner’s query, Musk simply said that the idea behind introducing a paid structure on Twitter is “more about treating everyone equally,” and that there “shouldn’t be different standards for celebrities.”
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Meanwhile, new data has revealed that Twitter's Blue subscription service has only generated $11 million in mobile subscriptions in the three months since it was launched.
The latest data from Sensor Tower shows that the uptake of the service has been underwhelming, although this figure does not include web-based subscriptions. Twitter has now made the Blue service available globally and has stopped sharing its daily and monthly active users, although it last reported 238 million monetisable daily active users.
While Musk’s move to mandate monetisation of Blue ticks on Twitter could help the microblogging platform earn more revenue in the future, neither Twitter nor Musk has yet commented on the data for the Blue service's uptake.