Elon Musk orders Twitter employees to work 24/7 on ‘Blue Tick’ fee

Elon Musk has ordered Twitter staff to work around the clock to impose a fee on users to keep their verified “blue tick” while the social media company’s new owner tries to put his stamp on the business .

Users can currently pay $4.99 per month to subscribe to Twitter Blue, which gives them access to exclusive features including an edit button. But Musk reportedly wants to increase prices and make it a requirement to have a verified profile on the social media platform, denoted by a blue tick next to one’s name.

According to two senior employees, Twitter employees have been working “around the clock” to provide Musk’s vision for verification. One person added that teams were told it was of “extreme gravity”.

Musk tweeted Sunday that “the entire verification process is being overhauled.”

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

A person familiar with Musk’s considerations before completing the $44 billion Twitter purchase said several pricing options were discussed, including $9.99 and $14.99 per month, adding that different ones User groups could be asked to test pricing models.

According to technology news site The Verge, Twitter I plan to charge $19.99 a month for the new Twitter Blue subscription, while the platformer blog reported that it would stay at $4.99 per month.

Spam or fake accounts were a sore point for Twitter and one of the reasons Musk tried to pull out of the acquisition business over the summer, believing the company had misrepresented the number of such profiles on the platform.

Twitter in April uncovered it had miscalculated its visitor numbers by 2 million users for around three years due to an “error”. Twitter has always claimed that fake or spam accounts account for less than 6 percent of its monetizable daily active users.

Meanwhile, morale is low at Twitter among some employees who fear layoffs are imminent and are seeking clarity from their new boss after months of uncertainty, according to several employees at the company.

“The revolving door of leadership has hurt the company while employees try to move on,” said one employee.

Speaking to Twitter employees in June ahead of the acquisition, Musk warned that the company needed to “get healthy” and undergo a “rationalization of headcount and spending.”

A Twitter executive said the new verification model “opens up another vector of abuse that we are unlikely to be prepared for given such a timeline.”

Video is among other new features Musk is considering after he tweeted a poll Monday asking about bringing back “Bring back Vine,” Twitter’s short-form video app the company discontinued in 2016 shall be.

It is considered by many to be the forerunner of TikTok, which has more than 1 billion users compared to Twitter’s more than 200 million. TikTok’s exponential growth over the past two years has led to social media platforms like Meta and YouTube launching short video offerings to try to emulate its model.

“What could we do to do better than TikTok,” Musk asked in a follow-up comment to the poll.