Musk introduces grey, gold, blue checks for Twitter

Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of Twitter, revealed on Friday that the social media site would use distinctively coloured badges to identify between accounts.

“Sorry for the delay, we’re tentatively launching Verified on Friday next week,” he tweeted.

“Gold check for companies, grey check for government, blue for individuals (celebrity or not) and all verified accounts will be manually authenticated before check activates.”

All verified individual accounts will have the identical blue check, according to Musk's subsequent tweet, but some will eventually be allowed to display a "secondary tiny logo denoting they belong to an org(anisation) if validated as such by that org(anisation)".

Since he bought the social media behemoth last month, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO's suggestion that users pay to be "certified" and receive a blue badge on their profiles has raised questions.

In order to prevent impersonation and false information, Musk suggested charging users $8 a month for a subscription that would get them access to the blue check, which was previously free but only available to organizations and public figures.

Early in November, Musk launched his subscription service for the first time, but it failed miserably since many users paid with a blue check before pretending to be famous people, organizations, or world leaders.

Musk delayed the launch a second time after initially pushing it back to November 29 in response to criticism. It now seems the movie will premiere on December 2.

Musk has stated that he wants to charge users for social media platform subscriptions in order to diversify the company's revenue stream. Currently, 90% of Twitter's income comes from advertising.

Since Musk acquired the platform, a number of well-known corporations have stopped running advertisements because they were concerned that the anticipated easing of content regulation would expose their brands to unacceptable content.

Half of Twitter's top 100 advertisers have indicated that they are stopping or "have seemingly ceased" their spending on the social network, according to the NGO Media Matters.

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