CNN Business in New York —
Elon Musk is ready to give his troubled new verification system for Twitter another try. This time in color.
Twitter’s CEO announced — via tweet, of course — that Twitter will tentatively launch its Verified launch on Friday next week. There are changes to the program that he apparently hopes will stop people from paying the $8 a month fee just to impersonate celebrities or companies.
“All verified accounts will be manually authenticated before verification is enabled,” he tweeted. “Painful but necessary.”
Musk did not specify what would be done manually or how much it might slow down the vetting process, especially in light of deep staff cuts and departures at Twitter since he took control a month ago.
The new system will have a gold check for companies, a gray check for government organizations and a blue check for individuals, whether they are celebrities or not.
Musk’s earlier attempt to launch paid verified accounts sparked a flood of fake accounts from people impersonating companies and prominent Twitter users, including Musk himself, and prompted Musk to announce another delay to the new system.
Its plans to charge for verified accounts have been suspended several times. Charging users for a verified account is key to Musk’s plan to make Twitter less dependent on ad revenue, which accounts for more than 90% of its revenue to date, and stop it losing money as advertisers pull away from the platform on social media.
“All verified individual people will have the same blue tick, as the boundary of what constitutes ‘notable’ is otherwise too subjective,” Musk tweeted. “Individuals may have a secondary small logo indicating that they belong to an organization if they are verified as such by that organization. Longer explanation next week.
Among the information missing from his tweets are details on pricing and when the blue checks will disappear for those who don’t want to pay and were vetted before Musk. Twitter, which is believed to have fired most or all of its public relations staff since Musk took over, did not respond to a request for details. Musk’s other companies, Tesla ( TSLA ) and SpaceX, have long not responded to requests for comment from most media outlets.
The chain of tweets in which Musk made the announcement began with Musk’s response to a tweet from former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich, a liberal economist who has criticized Musk’s massive layoffs since he took over Twitter.
“Here’s what Elon Musk fails to understand: Much of the value of corporations lies in their workers — their knowledge, skills and ideas,” Reich tweeted. “When he fired half the Twitter workforce and left even more, he wasn’t ‘cutting costs.’ He was actively destroying what he bought.” “Interesting… now pay $8,” Musk responded to Reich’s tweet.
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