The Twitter Verified Purge Went So Bad, Musk Secretly Gave It Away For Free
Elon Musk’s removal of legacy blue verification badges last week was met with a giant shoulder shrug from just about everyone. Athletes, celebrities, and users generally did not bite on the need to restore their blue check after the decision was made to remove them. Needless to say, Musk and his team at Twitter significantly overvalued how much value people put into their blue check marks and the service itself.
Even if the monthly price for the blue tick did not cost more than your standard latte, a subscription to a streaming service, and is cheaper than YouTube Premium, the low price did not entice many people to jump on board for access to longer tweets, an edit feature, and increased visibility, amongst a few other features. In fact, according to Travis Brown, who keeps track of verified accounts, Twitter Blue only gained a net 28 subscribers from previous legacy accounts as of a few days ago.
Yes, that is correct. Before the purge, Brown reported that 19,469 out of 407,000 legacy accounts had Twitter Blue. After the purge of blue ticks, Brown reported that Twitter Blue had 19,497 people subscribed from those legacy accounts. Therefore, the service only gained 28 new subscribers from people who previously had a legacy checkmark. The response, or lack thereof, was so muted that Musk even resorted to “paying” for a few celebrities, such as LeBron James.
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Of course, this number can increase, but Musk did not want to wait for that. Instead, he started giving out Twitter Blue, for free, to every user with over 1 million followers, seemingly to try a “FOMO” approach. I mean, he doesn’t respond to the press anymore, so who knows the actual reason? Anyway, celebrities like Ice Spice got on Twitter only to discover their account was now verified and subscribed to Twitter Blue. Spice even sent out a tweet making it clear that she did not pay for this service. As I noted previously, many Twitter users frown upon people “paying for Twitter,” and users who do regularly get humiliated on the platform. Whether or not that was her reason, she clearly did not want to be subscribed to Twitter Blue and did not sign up herself.
Now, you could say these people should be verified or were verified already. Still, Musk made a point of removing Twitter Blue to try and increase sales, realized no one was buying, then made it look like they paid for it to try and get other people to get on board in paying for it using celebrities to entice them. Of course, Musk responded by trolling one user with a meme. Proper CEO kind of stuff. Definitely going to boost sales and subscriptions. As some pointed out, it made Musk and Twitter look like hypocrites by re-creating the “class” system he wanted to do away with and did an immediate about-face (because the idea was terrible, to begin with) instead of just admitting it was a horrible idea.
However, since Musk and his companies always seem to be free-flowing, and in some state or form of testing, if you’re constantly just testing, I suppose you can never be wrong. That isn’t to say Twitter Blue is a complete failure. It has amassed $11 million in revenue as of March, but that isn’t the point. Congratulations, Twitter should have had that forever ago. It was one of the few good ideas. It is the idea to remove legacy checkmarks which made little sense because people could no longer tell if the account belonged to the person or business tweeting. It showed that these legacy users had no interest in paying for Twitter. It watered down the product by his own doing.
In his attempt to create a classless system, he only proved that there is a class system because there are, you know, classes in the real world. We are all not LeBron James. We are not all Ice Spice or A$AP Rocky. We are not all followed by millions of people. The class system wasn’t going to disappear from Twitter magically, and even if it did, we still need to know we are seeing tweets from the real person. Ideas like gold ticks made sense for legacy accounts or popular accounts. Really, any sort of system to classify legacy accounts would have been fine, while everyone else can subscribe to Blue.
Finally, Musk doesn’t really seem like an “all for one, and one for all” kind of guy. Sure, he might want to try to better humanity in some way by expanding our horizons to Mars and space, but he doesn’t live like everyone else. He lives in his own class system in real life and on Twitter, sitting on top of his golden porcelain throne, or sink, or whatever. He pushes his tweets and comments to the top of everyone’s feeds. He literally bought a platform that maybe only a handful of people could think about affording. He received loans from banks almost no one would get, and investments from people most of the world would never speak with.
If he truly wanted to create a classless system, perhaps he would have donated the $44 billion instead of wasting money on buying a social media platform just to halve its value in 6 months. I think that the meme Musk used above might just be a better reflection of himself at this point than of the users asking why they got their blue ticks back.
