Not a fan of Twitter’s plan to charge $8 per month for a verified blue checkmark? Then expect your tweets to lose some exposure.
In a Q&A with advertisers on Wednesday, Twitter's new owner Elon Musk signaled that Twitter will eventually treat tweets involving mentions or replies from nonpaying, unverified users as a bit like email spam.
“Over time—maybe not that long of time—when you look at mentions, replies, whatnot, the default will be to look at verified [accounts]. You can still look at unverified, just as in your Gmail or whatever you can still look at the probable spam folder,” he said.
Musk then added: “You’ll have your inbox of highly likely to be relevant, and you can still look at all the others, but it will default to the highly to the highly relevant category, which will be verified.”
On the same day, his company began rolling out the $8-per-month plan, which is supplanting the original Twitter Blue subscription. The support page for the new Twitter Blue notes the social media platform has added a new “priority verified notifications” tab.
“This feature allows everyone on Twitter to see notifications from verified accounts in a new verified section within Twitter’s Notifications timeline,” the support page says. “These changes are designed to help reduce fake, untrustworthy accounts, and promote a higher quality Twitter where people can join and engage safely on our platform.”
For subscribers, this amounts to moving the notification from verified users to the first slot in the notification section, when before it was on the right side, according to users. To see their mentions and replies from unverified users, the subscriber has to take another step and hit the "all" tab.
During the Q&A, Musk also reiterated he believes the paid subscription system is crucial to stamping out bots and spam over the platform. “By charging $8 a month, it raises the cost of a bot or troll somewhere between a thousand and ten thousand,” he said.
For bad actors that do pay up and receive the blue checkmark, Musk said Twitter plans to “vigorously” crack down on any attempts at fraud. “If someone tries to impersonate a brand, that account will be suspended and we will keep their $8. And they can keep doing that, and we’ll keep their $8 again,” he added. “We’ll do it all day long, they will stop.”
The subscription plan also promises to help Twitter pull in revenue when Musk took on $13 billion in debt to buy the platform, which has often struggled to post a profit. But on the flip side, the new system may make it even harder for free users to gain visibility over paying users and drive them to other platforms.
During the Q&A, Musk also addressed his abrupt decision to kill Twitter’s newly launched “Official” label, which was meant to authenticate high-profile accounts from brands, governments, and celebrities in the same way the blue checkmark has done.
“The problem with the Official, apart from being an aesthetic nightmare when looking at Twitter feed, is that it was simply another way of creating a two class system,” he said.
The new Twitter Blue subscription is currently rolling out in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK as an in-app purchase only for iOS users. Android and web support has yet to be added.