Opinion — Musk should not be charging for Twitter’s blue tick status

New Twitter boss Elon Musk is planning to charge $240-per-year for blue tick status. Could shifting away from simple verification and toward an open premium service lead to fundamental flaws in the platform? We reckon so.

Elon Musk’s hard-fought campaign to get his hands on Twitter was always superseded by a desire to make the platform more democratic, but his early moves point to a lack of critical thought.

The world’s richest man strolled into Twitter HQ last week in typically jovial fashion. Holding a kitchen basin, he posted a video with the annotation: ‘Let that sink in.’ He later Tweeted that the ‘bird is freed,’ inferring that big changes are on the way.

For starters, the Tesla chief rapidly laid off several top executives and followed up with an announcement that blue tick verification is to be completely overhauled.

He described the current system for allocating accounts with this status as ‘bullshit,’ but the majority of Twitter users are no happier with his suggestion to improve it.