Friday, March 29

Twitter withdraws payment for its verification system after approving thousands of fake profiles


Twitter has paralyzed its “Blue” payment service, which for a few days has been giving subscribers in the United States the blue symbol that identifies them as verified users and that before Elon Musk’s arrival at the company was obtained free of charge. The company has reversed the controversial measure after thousands of fake profiles and parody accounts obtained the badge.

The option to pay $8 a month for access to the verified account token, which until now had distinguished relevant profiles whose identity was confirmed, has made it easy for numerous users to impersonate others for prank or fraudulent purposes. Companies like Nintendo, the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly or Tesla itself, which Musk directs, saw how users who wore the blue verification “tick” pretended to be them for hours.

There have also been more amusing cases. Yesterday, the account that represents Jesus Christ – in the form of a parody, of course – wore the brand new blue badge reserved for profiles of “public interest, authentic, relevant and active”.

In this way, this Saturday the possibility of subscribing to Twitter Blue had disappeared in the United States for unverified users, although the company has not made any announcement in this regard.

On its website, Twitter does make it clear that any account created since November 9, when the new verification system was launched, will not be able to subscribe to Twitter Blue now. According to an internal message seen by the Platformer technology website, Twitter has chosen to paralyze the service and stop access to payment verification “to help respond to spoofing problems.”

While the chaos ensued – former US President George W. Bush’s supposedly official account said he missed shooting Iraqis – Twitter took improvised containment measures. For example, on Wednesday, it momentarily prevented users from changing their name. Rapper Doja Cat, for example, had changed her name to ‘Christmas’ just over a month before Christmas.

After realizing that he could not change it, he asked Musk in a tweet to allow him to change it: “I don’t want to be Christmas forever @elonmusk please help me I made a mistake (sic)”. The owner of Twitter told him that he could do it and Doja Cat immediately took the name “Elon Musk”, according to his account. The New York Times newspaper. On Friday, the rapper’s verified profile was “fart.” The American newspaper estimates that 140,000 accounts had signed up for Twitter Blue until Thursday.

On Thursday, Twitter announced some changes. Among them, that it has recovered the “official” label to distinguish some accounts, a brand that it had created this week, but hours later had been canceled by direct order of Musk. Apparently, only advertisers on the social network are now receiving this badge, which is intended to combat the impostor problem.

Until now there is no complete official version of what has happened in the last few hours or what will happen in the future. Musk has tweeted in the last few hours to clarify that the platform is preparing a system to identify parody accounts. As he has said, they will carry that explanation not only in the bio, but also next to the name. “Let’s add a ‘parody’ suffix to clarify,” he added.

Shortly before, he has criticized the mass media, the “media elite, for wanting to prevent the supposed objective of his company of promoting” citizen journalism “. “The media will continue to prosper, but growing competition from citizens will force them to be more precise, as their oligopoly is shrinking,” she wrote. In the last few hours, she has also reiterated that the ‘bots’ will soon be removed from the platform.

Mass layoffs

The chaos of the last hours completes two weeks of authentic chaos in the company since the arrival of the richest man in the world. Musk, who bought the technology company for 44,000 million dollars, announced on November 5 the dismissal of thousands of workers in the United States, Europe and Asia. The explanation, in a tweet, was: “There is no other choice.”

Shortly before, the billionaire had argued that the company had had a drastic drop in revenue, which he attributed to a stampede of advertisers due to “activist groups” that allegedly pressure companies to withdraw advertising. Volkswagen and General Motors have announced that they are no longer advertising on the platform, although the latter is waiting to see “the direction” that the social network takes.

In addition, other large advertising companies have recommended that their clients temporarily suspend their advertising on Twitter due to concerns about the company’s ability to monitor their content, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

In addition to the layoffs, Musk had boosted the subscription system by charging $8 a month in exchange for the blue badge. The company had already started experimenting with a $5 monthly subscription a few months ago, with benefits for users like the ability to edit tweets or customize their home screen.





www.eldiario.es