As Twitter CEO, Elon Musk is giving his employees an ultimatum: Meet his deadline to introduce paid verification on Twitter or pack up and leave.

The directive is to change Twitter Blue, the company’s optional, $4.99 a month subscription that unlocks additional features, into a more expensive subscription that also verifies users, according to The Verge. Twitter is currently planning to charge $19.99 for the new Twitter Blue subscription. Under the current plan, verified users would have 90 days to subscribe to the higher charge or lose their blue verified checkmark. Additionally, employees who are working on the project were told on Sunday (October 30) that they need to meet a deadline of November 7th to launch the feature or they will be fired.

Leading up to his acquisition of the social site, Musk has been clear that he wanted to revamp how Twitter verifies accounts and handles bots. On Sunday (October 30), he tweeted: “The whole verification process is being revamped right now” in a response to one user asking about help with verification.

So far, “Chief Twit” Musk has fired at least four top Twitter executives as his first order of business (CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, Twitter’s head of legal, policy and trust, and safety, Vijaya Gadde and general counsel Sean Edgett). He has brought in Tesla engineers as advisors and is planning mass layoffs aimed at middle managers and engineers who haven’t recently contributed to the code base. Those cuts are expected to begin this week with managers creating lists of employees to cut.

The Twitter Blue subscription was launched about a year ago as a way to view ad-free articles from some publishers and make other tweaks to the app, such as a different color home screen icon. Advertising remained the vast majority of its revenue and with this plan, Musk seems keen on growing subscriptions to become half of the company’s overall revenue.

Jason Calacanis (one of Musk’s top advisors) ran a poll on Twitter Monday asking, “How much would you pay to be verified & get a blue check mark on Twitter?” A majority of the results (81.4% as of Monday) opted that they would not pay to be verified on the social site.

Musk replied to the poll, “Interesting.”

See what other verified users had to say below:

• Cringest of Losers

  being verified is already a little embarrassing but being verified in a world where everybody also knows you PAY FOR IT?
  
  only the cringest of losers will abide. https://t.co/6Nj3rcNJXI

  — caleb hearon (@calebsaysthings) October 31, 2022

• Not Viable

  2) First of all, the notion that Twitter could charge for verified accounts, and survive as a platform, is rather silly. Celebrities won’t pay for verification. Most people won’t give Mu-k their credit card info, period. And random trolls could get verified. Not a viable idea.

  — Palmer Report (@PalmerReport) October 31, 2022

• For a Veneer of Legitimacy

  Having campaigned against PAID-FOR scam ads for years, I'm concerned at rumours Twitter will turn the verified #blueTick into a paid-for option.
  
  Scammers, shysters, criminals are likely to be happy to pay for, and manipulate this, for a veneer of legitimacy.

  — Martin Lewis (@MartinSLewis) October 31, 2022

• Trust Marks

  This makes sense if you view verified badges as status symbols and not what they were supposed to be: trust marks to certify identity so people can rely on what they see being said on Twitter. It’s a plan that makes sense if truth/trust on social media doesn’t matter to you. https://t.co/D5aYbiJmAE

  — Tiffany C. Li (@tiffanycli) October 30, 2022

• Misinformation

  I don't get the outrage over the blue checkmark. In fact, reducing it to a paid feature is great because after that it becomes abundantly clear why someone is verified, eliminating the perceived legitimacy of verification, which is in itself a huge engine of misinformation.

  — Noam Blum (@neontaster) October 31, 2022

• Can't Afford a Checkmark

  Apparently Twitter will charge $20 a month for someone to be “verified” on Twitter?
  
  That makes verification meaningless.
  
  The whole point was so people know you are the real you.
  
  I can barely afford to fill my grocery cart, I can’t afford a checkmark.
  
  I’m me I swear I am!

  — David Leavitt 🎲🎮🧙‍♂️🌈 (@David_Leavitt) October 31, 2022

• Rampant Impersonator Accounts

  So most of the good useful people on here who are verified will reject this, and all the very worst people will pay for it, making it even harder to identify reliable information and returning us to the days of rampant impersonator accounts. This is going great. https://t.co/E90gUDQy8W

  — @rob-sheridan.com on BSky (@rob_sheridan) October 31, 2022

• Pay Us

  Verified people are a major reason why many people are on twitter in the first place. If anything they should be paying us. Verified accounts bring people to twitter and help with ad revenue.

  — David Hogg 🟧 (@davidhogg111) October 31, 2022

• We Incentivize YOU

  Elon Musk has it all wrong.
  
  Twitter should PAY PEOPLE to be verified, not the other way around
  
  The greatest threat to Twitter's business is unverified trolls, bullies and misinformation kings.
  
  We incentivize YOU to say who you really are is worth billions to this platform.

  — Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) October 31, 2022

• Isn't About the Money

  There are ~360k verified accounts. If EVERY SINGLE ACCOUNT capitulated to this and bought in, it would generate an astoundingly meager $1.7M a month or $21.5M a year. What a ridiculous brass ring to be grabbing for while falling off your horse. This isn't about the money. https://t.co/AoJdkh0NEZ

  — C. Robert Cargill (@Massawyrm) October 31, 2022

• It's a Safety Thing

  To situate in context: I got verified because I was being harassed and part of the harassment was accounts pretending to be me. I know people have (over wrought) *feelings* about verification and classism — verification should be open to all and free — but it’s a safety thing. https://t.co/l6Jf93lNMC

  — Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (@IBJIYONGI) October 31, 2022

• Distribution Advantage

  Also, Twitter amplifies verified accounts everywhere: reply visibility, search, user suggestions, even the main timeline. That’s a lot of distribution advantage that can be purchased now.

  — Alex Heath (@alexeheath) October 31, 2022

• Peak Twitter

  People with verified accounts saying that keeping a blue check is not worth $20/month while people without verified accounts insist that they are totally worth it and we will all pay for them is Peak Twitter.

  — Eva (@evacide) October 31, 2022

• Fake News

  Hey @elonmusk, I am not paying $240 a year to stay verified. No one will.
  
  It's not a status symbol, it's a security feature. Making it a paid service will hurt a ton of journalists and make fake news spread more easily.

  — Matthew Chapman (@fawfulfan) October 31, 2022

• The Reason Verification Began

  Remember: The reason Twitter has "Verified Accounts" in the first place is because baseball manager Tony La Russa sued Twitter over an impersonator account: https://t.co/dXLuQiCzNq

  — David H. Montgomery (@dhmontgomery) October 31, 2022

• Supposed To Help

  The point of Twitter verification is that for certain individuals/organizations it’s useful to be able to verify their statements are coming from them. (This is why so many journalists/reporters are verified.) It’s supposed to help combat disinformation, not be a status symbol.

  — Katie Mack (@AstroKatie) October 31, 2022

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