Neither the Pope, nor Donald Trump nor Justin Bieber are spared. Twitter began on Thursday to massively remove the iconic blue verification badge from users who did not sign up for the Twitter Blue program.
Source: AFP
The owner of the social network, Elon Musk, who paid 44,000 million dollars for the companyhad promised to get rid of a check mark that he described as a “gentlemen and peasants” system.
offered in exchange sell the badge to anyone who pays $8 a month for the Twitter Blue program, in a maneuver that, according to what he said last year, “democratizes journalism and empowers the voice of the people.”
Thursday, Thousands of widely recognized accounts of celebrities and politicians, as well as those of many AFP journalists and other media organizations, appeared without the verification badge.
The symbol disappeared from celebrity accounts like Cristiano Ronaldo, Bill Gates or Lady Gaga yes as of many journalists, academics and militants. Even @jack, the account of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, lost it.
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Now those who subscribed to Twitter Blue can have the verification badge, whose color changes according to the nature of the account, and other benefits such as writing tweets or posting longer videos and editing posts within 30 minutes.
US Senator Brian Schatz drew attention to a possible effect on public trust in the event of tragedies or disasters.
“There really should be a way for emergency managers to verify they are real on this site or impostors will cause suffering and death,” he tweeted.
“I’m not complaining about my blue badge, I just think that during natural disasters it’s essential to know that FEMA is really FEMA,” he wrote, referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which delivers warnings in events like hurricanes or megastorms.
Thursday’s badge removal adds to a dispute between Twitter and various news organizations that claimed to be labeled as “state-affiliated” or “government-funded.”
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Public radio stations such as NPR in the United States, CBC in Canada or Sveriges Radio in Sweden have already made the decision to leave the network.
Musk’s troubled purchase of Twitter has led to the layoff of thousands of people and the departure of advertisers from the platform.
The users They complain that hate speech and misinformation have proliferated and that profiles with extreme positions they are gaining ground due to lower content moderation.
This month, a detailed forecast noted that Twitter’s ad revenue would fall by a wide margin in 2023.
