Elon Musk’s hope to getting Twitter back in the black (and potentially avoid bankruptcy) was to generate revenue with ‘new and improved’ Twitter Blue subscriptions (he admited ‘Twitter can not rely on advertisers’). The $7.99 USD a month service would offer the user a Blue Verified checkmark and a slew of other features (most of which are still ‘coming soon’). However, the new subscription option is only available to Twitter users who had created their Twitter account before November 9, 2022 AND sign- up within the Twitter App on iOS. This means Android and web users are unable to sign-up for the new Twitter Blue. However, it seems the option to sign up even if the user meets the above requirements has disappeared from iOS sometime during the night.
Twitter Blue is currently missing from the iPhone app’s menu rail. On iPads, it’s still there, except clicking on the option to subscribe returns an error. One of Engadget’s editors tried it out on his iPad and got a notification that says it will be available in his country in the future, even though he’s in the US, which is one of the service’s launch locations. Twitter has yet to announce why Blue is acting up, but according to reverse app engineer Jane Manchun Wong, the in-app purchase for Twitter Blue verification is no longer listed for production. One of her followers said they paid for a subscription and got verified, but now their blue checkmark has gone missing.
According to Ars Technica:
Reuters reported that Twitter announced today that it had reinstated the “Official” badges on some accounts, but because Twitter has no communications department (according to The Verge), it’s difficult to verify if paid verification is actually gone for good or just temporarily disabled. According to the tech site Platformer’s managing editor Zoe Schiffer, this message was posted in the Twitter Slack to clarify: “An update on what we did tonight: hid the entry point to Twitter Blue, added the ‘official’ label for ONLY advertisers. Note: here is at least one way for users to sign up for Blue. Legacy Blue users can go to subscriptions and upgrade. Note 2: Existing Blue subscribers will still have access to their Blue features.”
Twitter Blue has turned into a huge PR nightmare for Musk from the very start when he had first suggested the new price would be $20 USD a month. Then things got much worse when people learned the Blue Verified checkmark which was previously free would be tied to the new Twitter Blue. Very quickly the flaws in Twitter’s verification system were exposed when several celebrities last weekend modified the profile picture and name on their ‘verified’ account to impersonate Musk. Several of those accounts were banned and Musk had hoped that would be the last of that nonsense. However, more flaws were exposed in the past days as many fake accounts (including fake Elon Musk) were given the Blue Verified checkmark. On top of all of this, several key executives have left fearing Musk is gong to violate a 2011 FTC consent decree with the hasty roll-out of all these new features.
via Engadget
