(San Francisco) Elon Musk announced Tuesday that the launch of the new paid subscription to Twitter was postponed to November 29, after ten days of multiple controversies around the new owner’s flagship project.
“The relaunch of Blue Verified is postponed to November 29 to make sure it is concrete,” tweeted the general manager of the social network.
Before the takeover of Twitter by the boss of Tesla on October 27, the platform offered on the one hand a free identity verification service for notorious organizations and people, and, on the other hand, a paid subscription to options additional, dubbed Twitter Blue.
Elon Musk has launched manu militari the overhaul of this subscription to add authentication, which all users will therefore be able to obtain regardless of their notoriety, for eight US dollars per month.
The new Twitter Blue was activated a week ago on iPhones to total cacophony, days after half of the company’s 7,500 employees were laid off.
For 48 hours, many accounts impersonated celebrities or big corporations, from LeBron James to Nintendo. Pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly had to apologize on Thursday after a successful tweet from an account in its name, with the blue checkmark, promising free insulin.
On Friday, the ability to subscribe to “Twitter Blue” disappeared, and an internal memo, published by some US media, said the service was suspended “to address spoofing issues”.
In the system which will be launched on November 29, “any name change will cause the loss of the blue tick until the name is verified by Twitter”, promised Elon Musk on Tuesday.
He also said that people who do not subscribe will lose the blue tick (if they had obtained it for free) in the coming months.
At the same time, the social network released a new gray “Official” badge last Wednesday for notorious accounts.
Elon Musk had decreed the same day that he was removing this new label, before the director of development products Esther Crawford intervened, to explain that the badge would initially be reserved for governments and organizations.
The layoffs continued this week amid a turbulent Twitter. An engineer was fired from a tweet by Elon Musk after publicly questioning claims by the whimsical leader, who sees himself as the ultimate defender of freedom of expression.