A recent string of tweets by Twitter CEO Elon Musk have brought forth pay to play scheme revolving around Twitter verification badges.
The verification badges of Twitter represent a coveted status symbol. These badges enable the verified users to communicate entirely with other verified users via a special response tab. Billionaire and investor CEO Musk stated that the entire system responsible for awarding these badges was deeply flawed and corrupt. Anybody could buy them from a third party.
In his tweet, Musk stated, “Far too many “verified” check marks 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. Piggy backing off payment system plus Apple/android is a much better way to ensure verification.”
in response to this tweet, a user accused that Twitter employees were minting money out of selling a single verification badge for around $15,000. The user also claimed that, for some accounts, Twitter denied verifying them through the process of standard application and instead approach them to do it privately for an exorbitant amount of money.
The new CEO agreed to this allegation with “yup” in a reply tweet, thus confirming that the user’s words were true. This comes in after more than half of the Twitter staff has been slashed by the new CEO who has also vowed to sell verification for eight dollars per month.
If a probe into the matter concludes that a pay to play scheme really existed at the company, one cannot even envisage the punishments current or former Twitter workforce could be subjected to in the near future.
It was only days after Elon Musk took over as the Twitter CEO and started firing top officials including former chief Parag Agarwal that Twitter’s chief advertisement officer Sarah Personette stepped down from her post.
Musk also said, that after taking over Twitter, he would moderate its content limits and censorship, and present a subscription based profit model to the company. But the takeover had been haunting advertising companies for months.
