Twitter public relations AKA Elon Musk’s private Twitter account introduced simply after midnight as we speak that Twitter will probably re-launch the Verified program subsequent week Friday, on December 2. The brand new program could have a number of colours for various sorts of accounts, and Musk says that there might be guide verification earlier than the checkmark prompts.

Verified firms will get a gold checkmark, verified authorities accounts will get a gray checkmark, and people — superstar or not — will get a blue checkmark.

The largest query: how will Twitter manually verified all accounts earlier than the checkmark prompts? The corporate dropped about half of its 7,500 staff in a mass layoff, one other 1,000 or so stop when confronted with an ultimatum from Musk to work tougher, and Twitter additionally axed about 80% of its contractor workforce.

That implies Musk will both offload the verification job onto different entities (contracted firms? Amazon’s Mechanical Turk?) or take a really very long time to work via reported about 400,000 verified accounts. Alternatively, the launch date may get punted farther down the highway: Musk does use the phrase “tentatively” in his launch announcement.

The verified standing for governments and firms appears to be free; the verified standing for particular person accounts will probably require Twitter’s revamped Twitter Blue subscription at $8/month.

Twitter initially re-launched the Verified program in early November, then rolled it again as issues emerged.

Basically, the brand new ranges of verification will reveal which accounts are official, however the private degree of verification that the blue checkmark has all the time indicated will now be accessible to anybody.

Nonetheless an open query, as I requested on November 9: which firms and which media shops are sufficiently big to be official?

“What Twitter means by “main” media shops stays to be seen, however suggests there’s some cut-off between shops which might be sufficiently big to be Official and others that aren’t. Equally, the wording of “some public figures” signifies that there’s a cut-off at some degree figuring out who could be official. What these cut-offs are stays to be seen.”

Underneath Elon Musk Twitter has been veering away from being an almost-entirely advert supported service to a subscription service. Twitter would want 64 million subscribers to interchange prior income at its earlier degree of bills. However now, after all, new proprietor and CEO Musk has significantly lower prices, which means a a lot decrease bar will make the service worthwhile.