Upon announcing the paid $8 Twitter Blue verification badge, Elon Musk didn’t predict the hilarious turn of events that would follow and eventually lead to the service being put on hold. But it wasn’t much of a surprise given how volatile everything related to Twitter has been over the past few weeks.
Musk has now gone ahead and announced November 29 to be the relaunch date for the Twitter Blue verification badge; this time with the promise to “make sure that it is rock solid.”
That effectively means changing one’s verified name will lead to the loss of the blue check until that name is confirmed by Twitter to meet its terms of service. When the service was first launched, many instances of people impersonating famous personalities and accounts had come forward.
When the Twitter Blue verification badge was made available as part of an $8-a-month subscription on November 9, a number of fake accounts had started making controversial statements while pretending to be famous people.
One such account pretending to be Nintendo of America tweeted a photo of Mario giving the middle finger, while another pretending to be basketball player LeBron James made a request for a trade from the Los Angles Lakers.
Meanwhile, there were several accounts impersonating Musk himself, while others chose to make controversial and offensive statements, pretending to be politicians and world leaders. As a result, the service was temporarily rolled back.
A lot has changed at Twitter since Musk completed its acquisition on October 27 for $44 billion. There were immediate firings of top executives and layoffs of approximately 7,500 employees followed later on. Meanwhile, a number of companies have paused or pulled back their advertising practices on Twitter as well.