Now Elon’s seemingly radical move isn’t completely unprecedented. He’s been talking about making Twitter more profitable and finding a way to monetize it better than the current Twitter Blue offering, which goes for $5 a month and has features such as editable tweets. Elon thinks that’s too low and now has given the Twitter staff an ultimatum to make Twitter blue far more profitable. Paid verifications are seemingly the best they’ve come up with. Now anyone who has Twitter Blue will have the option to become verified, along with all the previous options and anyone who’s already verified will have to PAY FOR verification for the same monthly $20 charge. If they don’t pay they are given a 90 day waiting period and after that, blue checkmark is gone. It’s a pretty bold and brutal move for the company, after all while verification is meant to be a feature to show the pages of legitimate news source, politicians and influential figures, it’s basically become a status symbol for anyone who gets their hands on it . Twitter is leveraging that status to see who’s willing to literally fork out money for the right. And chances are when this feature launches , we’ll see quite a bunch of people jump right on it, even momentarily just so that they can be verified(welcome to the crazy world we live in). But of course outside of official celebrities/influencers , news publications and even government/NGO institutions, question is how long regular old you or me will be able to keep up paying for verification ($240 a year guys) and if people will consider it worthwhile. We know people like Passion Java would consider it worthwhile, but what about the rest of us?

Worse off, what happens when Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, even LinkedIn decide to copy this feature? Will we all have to live in a world where now proving that you’re you on social media requires a payment to someone. That’s not exactly a world anyone wants to live in, but it’s one Elon Musk might just be bringing with all his new moves.

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