Musk Appears To Revoke N.Y. Times’ Blue Checkmark For Refusing To Buy Paid Twitter Subscription

Topline

The New York Times’ main Twitter account appeared to lose its blue verification checkmark on Sunday, one of the only high-profile accounts to have the symbol revoked after Twitter’s billionaire owner Elon Musk threatened to take away verification on Saturday from accounts that don’t pay for the company’s Twitter Blue subscription service.

This picture taken on May 23, 2020, in Los Angeles, California, shows a woman looking at a computer … [+] screen with a tweet by the New York Times newspaper account showing the early edition front page of May 24, 2020, with a list of 1,000 names printed on it, that represents 1% of the lives lost due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, COVID-19, in the US.

AFP via Getty Images

Key Facts

Twitter’s “legacy” verified program—which operated before Musk took over the platform last year, granting blue checkmarks to “notable” users whose identities were confirmed—was supposed to start “winding down” on Saturday, but many well-known accounts still have verification symbols granted under the old regime.

The account @nytimes no longer had a checkmark next to its name on Sunday, though several of the paper’s other accounts, including those for its arts, opinion and games sections, still did.

Several high-profile people and organizations—including Lebron James, Patrick Mahomes, Dan Rather and the New York Times—have said they would not pay for Twitter Blue to maintain their blue checkmarks, but many users other than the Times that vowed not to pay up haven’t lost their verification symbols yet.

An anonymous Twitter account brought the Times’ refusal to pay for a blue checkmark to Musk’s attention early Sunday morning, leading the billionaire to tweet, “ok, we’ll take it off then.”

Musk criticized the publication early on Sunday, tweeting its “propaganda isn’t even interesting” and “their feed is the Twitter equivalent of diarrhea.”

In a statement to Forbes, a spokesperson for the Times said, “We aren’t planning to pay the monthly fee for check mark status for our institutional Twitter accounts. We also will not reimburse reporters for Twitter Blue for personal accounts, except in rare instances where this status would be essential for reporting purposes.“

Key Background

Since buying the majority of Twitter last fall, Musk repeatedly threatened to take away verification badges from non-paying users, claiming the old verification system was “corrupt.” The service could also be designed to help shore up Twitter’s revenue, as Musk contends with a loss of advertisers since his controversial and sometimes-chaotic $44 billion takeover of the company. Through Twitter Blue, participating organizations will need to pay a $1,000 a month subscription fee, and individual users will have to pay $8 a month to maintain their verified status. Users who are part of paying organizations can also be verified by being associated with them. The 10,000 most-followed organizations and hundreds of Twitter’s top advertisers will reportedly be exempt from having to pay to keep their verification. Twitter Blue also provides subscribers a feed with fewer ads and the ability to edit and write longer tweets. But Twitter Blue’s initial pay-for-verification program, launched last year, allowed impersonators to wreak havoc on the site. In response, some organizations were given yellow checkmarks.

Chief Critic

The New York Times is not the only major media outlet that said it wouldn’t pay for Twitter Blue. The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times also said they wouldn’t pay for verification and won’t allow its journalists to expense the cost of the service, according to BuzzFeed News.

Forbes Valuation

$202.4 billion. That’s how much Forbes estimates Musk to be worth, mostly due to his stakes in Tesla and SpaceX, making him the second-richest person in the world behind LVMH’s Bernard Arnault.

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Key Facts

Key Background

Chief Critic

Forbes Valuation

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