Elon Musk's Move To Make Everyone Pay For Twitter Verification Is Going Horrible
Musk is now paying for LeBron James and William Shatner's badges.
So far, Elon Musk's move to make everyone pay for a verified badge is going...badly. It is going so poorly that he has taken $24 out of his pocket to pay for William Shatner, Stephen King, and Lebron James’ verified badges.
Other athletes and personalities don’t seem to know, don’t want to pay because they will not have their subscriptions reimbursed, or just flat out don’t seem to care. The most followed soccer player on Twitter, Cristiano Ronaldo, is now just a regular @Cristiano. Same with Neymar, Erling Haaland, and even FC Barcelona. It looks as though Real Madrid is paying a whopping $1000 per month to keep their gold badge for now. However, they are not paying for their satellite pages, as per ESPN.
However, other players like Manchester City’s Riyad Mahrez honestly do not care about “weird ideas, lol.” Remember that these players earn hundreds of thousands of dollars per week and do not want to pay $8 per month. Mahrez makes about $200,000 per week. It’s laughable how Musk and his team thought the verified check mark substantiated value and how people value their online presence. Maybe even more laughable is they thought people would pay Elon Musk. Rich Eisen lost his badge live on air and said, “This is fantastic that I lost my blue check mark on live radio and television so I can let everybody know I'm not paying that man a dime." LOL. Major publications like the Washington Post, ESPN, the New York Times, BuzzFeed, the Los Angeles Times, and more are not paying to verify their main pages or their employees.
Besides people perhaps giving the whole pay-for-verification scheme a giant shoulder shrug, it is also that, for the most part, people do not want to pay because there is the notion that it is "uncool" to pay for a verified check mark. I have seen a meme making fun of someone paying for Twitter countless times. The public social media undressing of your account in your comments isn’t going to entice anyone to want to cough up a fee to get made fun of. If Twitter is a town square, no one wants to be the self-appointed joker in the middle doing a song and dance for Lord Elon Farquaad.
Now, I am not one to generally give in to trolling, so I tried it for a month or two when it first rolled out to see if it would be worth it, or at the least an interesting feature, but alas, I did not see the benefit after a few months. You get an edit feature, which you can do for free on any other platform, access to longer tweets I did not need, and priority in the For You feed and the comments. I did not think some extra impressions were enough to justify $8. And wow, I got 18 new followers, if you see below. Also, I don’t earn any money on Twitter or really use it much compared to other social platforms. I also disagree with Elon Musk on his general direction on Twitter. His polarizing commentary is a bit much to stomach, it is usually unwarranted and doesn’t add to the conversation, is done to provoke, and is constantly put at the top of your feed. Also, the general increase in racism and anti-semitism were basically my final straw. At the end of the day, I’ll use that money to pay for YouTube Premium. I despise seeing ads every 5 minutes.
Also, justifying my reason for canceling Twitter Blue is the fact that it was mainly for news, and now I can get quality news from so many other places. There are platforms like Substack, with personalized blasts of news you actually want to read, and just the plethora of news apps that have significantly increased in quality. I must have at least 20-30 news apps or specialty apps I use to get news from, such as IMDB for movie-related news. And, since I pay for YouTube, you can find anything you want on there. Let’s also not forget other social media apps to get news. Quickly, TikTok is becoming a social platform and a search engine. In addition, trending social content IS the news. You want to be on the most popular platform to keep up with the content and what people are into that week. As someone who works in social media, I kind of have to. While I might get an occasional update from someone I follow on Twitter, I may check the tweet and close the app.
I also don't find it nearly as exciting as it once was in its early existence. Everything is so polarizing, hateful, and argumentative that the platform's fun has evaporated. I used to go on the platform for updates from athletes, and entertainment outlets, to catch up on trending topics, join the conversation, and follow sports games in real time. The platform can still be used for all of that. However, it’s hard to justify using a platform with a CEO dictating the conversation, who has done little to prevent hate and racism, blasts his tweets and comments in front of everyone and now wants you to pay for it. No thanks. I’ll join soccer player Mason Mount and be on other platforms.