Brilliant plan of business supergenius still going great
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Elon still hasn’t figured out that Twitter needs companies like the New York Times far more than they need it:
Twitter removed the “verified” badge from the New York Times’ main account on Sunday, a move that billionaire owner Elon Musk pushed for overnight after learning that the news organization would not pay for its Twitter Blue service.
he move continues Musk’s years-long grudge against U.S. journalists who have reported critically on him, and it will raise the risks of impersonation. It also contradicts an internal plan, first reported by the Times on Thursday, to keep the badges on for the 10,000 most-followed organizations, regardless of whether they paid.
Twitter had said that it would begin winding down its traditional verification program starting Saturday, removing the blue check mark icons it had for years applied to the accounts of verified companies, journalists and public figures.
The pathetic thing is that, like his dumbest cronies, he really seemed to think that companies and celebrities would pay a monthly fee for an emoji that would no longer reflect any status other than being on the same team as Cat Turd Two and David Sacks.
The funny part is that Twitter does not actually have the capacity to do systematic removals of blue checks, just some selected accounts Elon doesn’t like. So instead they’re just taking away the ability to tell the difference between legacy verified accounts and idiots who pay Twitter:
On Sunday, Twitter also changed the text that pops up when one clicks the badge to say that an account is “verified because it’s subscribed to Twitter Blue or is a legacy verified account.” Previously, the site had distinguished between the two. The change will make it harder for users to understand whether an account was previously verified as legitimate or has gotten a badge purely by paying for it.
It was unclear why other accounts still had their badge. The Post reported on Friday that the removal of verification badges would require extensive manual work because of the company’s error-prone software, which one former employee described as “all held together with duct tape.”
Business schools are going to be using this as a model of what not to do for a long time,