Trouble over blue ticks – Musk’s first big Twitter revenue idea turns out to be a disaster

Twitter has paused the ability to buy a verification tick with subscription payments after a wave of fake accounts from brands and celebrities. The subscription should probably be available again at the end of next week, wrote the new Twitter-Owner Elon Musk in a tweet on Sunday night. He made no further statements about how the system should be better protected against fake accounts that look deceptively real.

Twitter had only implemented the reorganization of the tick marks announced by Musk on Wednesday. So far, they have been granted to celebrities, politicians and companies after an audit by Twitter. According to the new model, anyone who pays eight dollars a month gets the tick. There is no identity check. The tick looks the same in both cases. Whether you are dealing with an earlier, actually verified account or with a new, purchased tick only becomes clear from the text after clicking on the symbol.

Super Mario shows the middle finger

Some users created credible-looking fake accounts with the ticks they bought. A LeBron James impersonator announced that the basketball superstar wanted to leave his club. On behalf of the game company Nintendo a picture was posted showing crowd favorite Mario showing the middle finger. The pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly apologized to Twitter users who were led to believe by a fake account that insulin would be distributed free of charge in the future. An allegedly verified Chiquita fake account announced that it had overthrown the Brazilian government.

On Friday night, an additional gray checkmark with the word “Official” next to it appeared in the previously verified profiles. Musk halted the launch of the symbol in the middle of the week. As a further measure, he announced that accounts that pretend to be someone else would have to have the word “parody” in their name in the future. The problem with the fake accounts wasn’t that there weren’t any rules against it, but that they couldn’t be discovered and deleted quickly enough – while they had verification ticks.

Is Twitter going bankrupt?

Musk bought Twitter two weeks ago for around $44 billion. Since then, the company has been struggling, among other things, with the reluctance of large advertising customers. Advertising revenue recently made up around 90 percent of Twitter revenue. In a meeting with his employees this week, Musk hadn’t ruled out the possibility of bankruptcy either.

Musk had cut about every second of the approximately 7,500 jobs on Twitter in the past week. Now he said at the employee meeting that the company still has too many employees.

On Thursday, other top executives left the company: Yoel Roth, who was responsible for filtering out objectionable content, and Lea Kissner, head of information security. According to media reports, Robin Wheeler, who was recently responsible for relations with advertisers, submitted her resignation, but was persuaded by Musk to stay. She tweeted that she was still at it.