Elon Musk Admits Twitter Staff Sold Blue Check Verification For Up To $15,000
by Deeksha Sharma, Rupublic World, November 6, 2022
Twitter CEO Elon Musk acknowledged a major lapse on the platform relating to blue tick verifications, days after he revealed his plans to charge $8 for it.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk acknowledged a major lapse on the platform relating to blue tick verifications, days after he revealed his plans to charge users $8 per month for it. Recently, a user on the platform claimed that “Twitter employees were selling verification for upwards of $15,000.”
The user further added that “for certain accounts, mine included, they would refuse to verify you through the standard application and then privately offer to verify you for $$ behind the scenes,” and called for a probe into the matter. Providing a brief response to this, Musk wrote “Yup” on his Twitter handle.
The Twitter CEO also pointed out how easy it has been to acquire a blue tick verification badge on the platform with the help of third-party apps. Acknowledging this, Musk wrote in another post: “Far too many legacy “verified” checkmarks were handed out, often arbitrarily, so in reality they are *not* verified. You can buy as many as you want right now with a Google search. Piggybacking off payment system plus Apple/Android is a much better way to ensure verification,” he added.
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One of the funniest meltdowns has been from the blue-checked Twitter people who are upset over Musk’s proposal that he would charge $8 for the verification plus some advantages like fewer ads. Among them was Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) flipping out at Musk and accusing him of trying to shadowban her account after she went off on him.
But one Twitter user @WSBChairman who has almost 900,000 followers dropped a bit of a bomb that got a lot of attention, including from Elon Musk.
It wasn’t clear if the “yup” was an acknowledgment of the whole tweet being true — that verification had been sold for that amount — or just that investigation was needed.
WSBChairman said people had paid the $15,000 which is why some of them were upset about now having to pay $8/month on top of that. "Most people upset about being able to pay $8 for verification are upset because they paid $15,000. Far more people paid for verification than you would think. Whoever was running the operation must have made a killing."
He also dropped a tweet, alleging it was a contact with whom he had been talking apparently about Twitter.
Now, we don’t know about the validity of such a claim, but that would be a huge scandal if the prior Twitter powers that be were involved in that. That might explain why some liberal blue checks are melting down if they paid out for it. But you would think we would have heard about this before.
It’s been obvious that the verification process was very arbitrary — that folks who were real media but conservative might not get a blue-check mark, but random people on the liberal side would. The whole process could use an overhaul and that’s one of the things that could be shaken out with the new $8/month system.
But it sounds like Musk is willing to go all-in to straighten it out.
