Elon Musk’s newly acquired micro-blogging platform Twitter has started labelling Indian government handles and Indian media as “official” ahead of the roll-out of blue tick subscriptions across India.
In the Twitter handles of various Indian government organizations, the “official” label was noticed. For example, Prime Minister’s Office, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s official Twitter account, and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh’s Twitter account also have the “official label”. Earlier, on Tuesday, Twitter’s executive Esther Crawford announced that he will roll out a second verification label to limit confusion between legitimate accounts and ones that pay for their blue ticks, New York Post reported.
Verified accounts will now come with an “Official” label beneath their username, complete with a grey verification checkmark, Twitter executive Esther Crawford said.
She further said that the label will help the users to distinguish between official accounts and the Twitter Blue subscription, which is taking over the blue check previously used for verified accounts.
“Not all previously verified accounts will get the ‘Official’ label and the label is not available for purchase,” New York Post quoted Crawford saying.
Official pages will be designated for “government accounts, commercial companies, business partners, major media outlets, publishers, and some public figures,” she added.
Twitter has not given any explanation on how the company would decide which accounts are designated as “official.”
Last week, Musk confirmed the reports and announced that the company will charge USD 8 a month for Twitter’s subscription service with priority in replies, mentions, and searches.
“Twitter’s current lords and peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit. Power to the people! Blue for USD 8/month,” he tweeted.
However, Musk’s decision of implementing the blue tick fee did not go well with many. Even some advertisers pulled back their leg from the site. The Twitter Blue subscription was launched widely almost 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 colour home screen icon.
In April, Twitter accepted Musk’s proposal to buy and take the social media service private. However, Musk soon began sowing doubt about his intentions to follow through with the agreement, alleging that the company failed to adequately disclose the number of spam and fake accounts on the service. In July, in a surprising turn of events, Elon Musk who had long been showing his interest to buy Twitter terminated the deal. The Tesla CEO did so by alleging that Twitter violated their mutual purchase agreement by misrepresenting the number of spam and fake bot accounts on its platform.
After Musk put out the deal termination announcement, the market saw a sharp decline. Later, Twitter sued Musk accusing him of using bots as a pretext to exit a deal. A little later, Musk confirmed that he would move forward with the Twitter buyout at the originally agreed price of USD 54.20 per share. (ANI)
