Tag: relaunch

Categories
Mobile Syrup

Musk aims to relaunch Blue on December 2 with manual verification

Twitter owner Elon Musk plans to “tentatively” relaunch Twitter Blue on December 2nd with new, colour-coded checkmarks. Previously, Musk planned to relaunch Blue on November 29th but later said Twitter would hold off until it could deal with the impersonation issue.

In a tweet, Musk said that companies would get gold checkmarks, governments would get grey checkmarks, and individuals would get blue checkmarks, “celebrity or not.” Moreover, Musk said that “all verified accounts will be manually authenticated before [the] check activates,” a move he described as “painful, but necessary.”

In another tweet, Musk said, “All verified individual humans will have [the] same blue check, as [the] boundary of what constitutes “notable” is otherwise too subjective.” Moreover, he said individuals can get a secondary logo showing they belong to an organization if verified by that institution. Musk promised a longer explanation would come next week.

These changes come after Musk rolled out a new version of the Twitter Blue subscription that gave subscribers a blue checkmark that matched the verified badge previously given to notable accounts. The new subscription costs $9.99/mo in Canada. However, Musk suspended the new Blue within days after Twitter was flooded with paid ‘verified’ accounts that impersonated brands, celebrities, and politicians. Blue caused chaos and even led to significant stock drops for some companies.

Moreover, Twitter employees warned Musk and leadership of the potential problems — including impersonation risks — ahead of the Blue launch. Musk ignored them.

While the changes to Blue and Musk’s promise to actually verify Twitter users seem promising, it remains to be seen how it plays out on December 2nd (or whenever the changes go live). Moreover, questions remain about how Musk plans to manually verify all the users who sign up, given he decimated Twitter’s staff and contract workers and continued firing people even after saying he would start hiring new staff.

You can follow the ongoing Musk and Twitter saga here.

Source: Elon Musk Via: The Verge

Categories
Mobile Syrup

Musk plans to relaunch paid verification on November 29th

Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk still plans to forge ahead with paid verification on the platform, apparently learning little from the recent fiasco.

In a recent tweet, Musk announced that Twitter Blue would launch again on November 29th “to make sure that it is rock solid.”

As a quick refresher, Twitter launched then quickly un-launched a revamped version of its Blue subscription service on November 9th. Customers who signed on for the $9.99 subscription got a blue checkmark next to their name. However, that checkmark was previously used as Twitter’s verification badge to denote authentic accounts, primarily a tool intended to prevent people from impersonating high-profile accounts like those of government officials, companies, celebrities, or journalists.

Basically, everyone with a modicum of foresight knew paid verification was a bad idea, including Twitter’s own trust and safety team, which detailed potential problems and solutions in a seven-page document served up to Musk and his cohort ahead of the November 9th launch. Naturally, Musk ignored most of the suggestions and, as predicted, paid verification resulted in a flood of impersonations on the platform. Accounts sporting the new paid badge impersonated brands, government officials, and more, leading some to lose significant amounts of money. One account even parodied Ontario Premier Doug Ford. Admittedly, it was fun to watch the chaos unfold.

Musk also tweeted his apparent plan for dealing with impersonations, which is just temporarily removing the blue checkmark from accounts when they change their name. Accounts will get the checkmark back once Twitter confirms the new name meets the company’s terms of service. It remains unclear who will be vetting all these name changes, given Musk laid off a significant chunk of Twitter’s staff, fired most of the company’s contract workers, and issued an ultimatum to those who remain to put in long hours or quit. It’s also unclear if Twitter will vet account names when they sign up for Blue.

Musk reiterated plans to remove unpaid legacy checkmarks “in a few months” as well and tweeted about ‘X’ again, calling it the “everything app.”

Aside from the Blue relaunch, Musk tweeted some other details about ongoing Twitter projects. Leaker Jane Manchun Wong tweeted evidence of Twitter working on end-to-end encrypted DMs, to which Musk replied simply, “😉.” Wong also tweeted that the source detail, which shows the app a person tweeted from, was gone in the app prototype she looked at. It’ll be sad to see tweet sources go, considering how much fun tech folks had spotting Android ads tweeted from iPhones.

You can follow along with the latest Twitter turmoil here.

Source: Elon Musk Via: The Verge