According to a report published on Sunday by the New York Times, Twitter will not allow its new monthly subscribers to obtain the blue verification mark for their accounts until after the conclusion of the midterm elections that are scheduled to take place in the United States of America on Tuesday.
Twitter's delay comes just a day after it announced that it will launch a program that will enable subscribers to its paid service, Twitter Blue, to get that mark on their personal accounts for a payment of $7.99 per month.
"It's a powerhouse for the general public," Twitter said of the new feature in its announcement. "Your account will get a blue verification mark, just like the celebrities, companies and politicians you follow," she added.
But many Twitter users and employees have raised concerns that the paid blue check marks could cause confusion ahead of next Tuesday's election; Because it makes it easy for any user to make his account unique, as if it were an official party, and then spread false information about the election results, which could cause sedition.
According to the New York Times, a Twitter employee on the company's own messaging channel, Slack, asked why the network would make such a risky change before an election that could cause election interference.
On Sunday, the manager working on the blue mark project responded, "We have decided to postpone the launch to November 9, after the elections." This date is for next Wednesday, i.e. only one day after the start of the elections, when some of the results have not yet been decided, meaning that the danger will not be gone on that day.
One of the changes Elon Musk, who acquired Twitter on October 28, after completing a $44 billion deal, is making it possible to get a blue certification mark for a monthly subscription.
And because the man is still under the financial pressures resulting from the deal, especially since 13 billion of the value of the deal is debts that it has to pay off to investors, he is accelerating the pace to increase the company’s revenues in light of the sharp decline in revenue, which he attributed to the advertisers’ cessation of advertising on the platform.
And to get rid of the financial burdens as well, last Friday, Musk laid off about half of Twitter’s employees, or about 3,700 employees, and said at the time: that he was forced to do so, given that the company loses about 4 million dollars a day.
Musk and his advisors also discuss different ways to make money from Twitter. In addition to the blue verification mark, they talked about the possibility of charging for private messages that users can send to high profile users, and charging for watching some videos. They also discussed the possibility of reviving the short video app, Vine.
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