Elon Musk is due to try once more on Monday to launch a Twitter subscription package including account authentication, one of his flagship projects for the platform, following a first attempt marked by great confusion and the influx of fake accounts.
Announced Saturday on the company’s official account, the option did not yet seem available at the start of the American day.
The platform is supposed to offer its users to pay 8 dollars per month, or 11 dollars for holders of Apple devices, to be granted, following verification, a check mark supposed to certify the identity of the subscriber, blue for individuals. , gold for companies, gray for institutions.
Subscribers will also be able to edit tweets following they’ve been posted or upload better quality videos.
The first attempt, in early November, was accompanied by an outbreak of accounts posing as those of celebrities or large corporations and mixed messages.
The launch of a new subscription formula was then postponed several times.
This initiative should allow Twitter to diversify its turnover beyond advertisements.
Revenue from the latter has indeed fallen in recent months with the economic slowdown, while many advertisers have been scalded by the takeover of the platform by Elon Musk, fearing to find their ads with controversial content.
The new boss, who presents himself as a defender of freedom of expression and regularly claims that Twitter had previously shown a bias in favor of left-wing ideas, has indeed significantly reduced the staff responsible for moderation and authorized the return to the platform of suspended personalities, like Donald Trump.
He himself published a series of controversial messages this weekend, attacking in turn the outgoing White House adviser on the pandemic, Anthony Fauci, the former head of Twitter security Yoel Roth, or even the “Wokism”, a position that denounces the injustices suffered by minorities but whose supposed excesses have become the bane of conservatives.
The multi-billionaire is also trying to attract attention by promoting for ten days what he calls the “Twitter files”, internal documents supposed to illustrate questionable moderation practices.
Invited to a show stage in San Francisco by comedian Dave Chappelle on Sunday, the world’s richest man was greeted with a mix of applause and hearty boos.
So much heckling “is a first for me in real life (it’s frequent on Twitter),” Elon Musk later noted in a tweet.