When Elon Musk first launched the Twitter Blue subscription service, the whole point was to make it possible to buy the blue tick as a coveted status symbol. Now the billionaire is backing off (at least for now), announces in his tweet Blue Verified says that the relaunch of the checkmarks will be delayed, and that when it does, it is likely that the marks distinguishing Blue Verified subscribers and officially verified accounts will be different colors.
“Until there is high confidence to stop Blue Verified from restarting, to stop impersonation,” Musk tweeted. “They will probably use a different color check for organizations than individuals.”
Many Twitter users have suggested this obvious solution before the fake account scandal found the platform littered with popular but chaotic brand imitations. This eventually led to Musk deselect Pay $8 for a Blue Verified subscription.
Musk’s tweet did not explain how different color checks for organizations and individuals would actually prevent individuals from being identified. Twitter staff warned him first said fraudsters would use Blue Verified to impersonate world leaders or public figures, but Musk ignored that advice at the time. If it is still trying to salvage its original idea of selling the ticker to subscribers based on regular users who crave the popular status marker, there is still a risk that fake accounts could harm individual users.
Just this week, for example, Vice informed the fake account used Blue Verified to impersonate FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried. That fake account referred to a fake video showing Bankman-Fried promising to refund victims of the FTX scandal by signing them up for a cryptocurrency sweepstakes, which would help them not only recover lost funds but also double their money.
Relying on the video and Twitter’s verified token, the fake account tricked users into visiting cryptocurrency giveaways and sending tokens to the scammer. In return, the defrauded Twitter users got nothing, Vice reports.
In this particular case, Bankman-Fried’s victims were targeted for crypto scams, but more often than not, such scams rely on fake celebrity endorsements. If Blue Verified doesn’t distinguish between fake and official celebrity accounts, it’s easy to see how these crypto scams could become a bigger problem for Twitter.
This was reported by Reuters Musk had originally planned to revive Blue Verified next week, but his latest tweet suggests the wait will be longer.
Musk plans to launch other Twitter 2.0 features
It makes sense that Musk made protecting brands from imitation a priority when relaunching Blue Verified, because Twitter can’t make a profit without providing assurance to advertisers. But Musk has other big ideas, and he told his dwindling team of engineers that he would requires long hours from them to help develop the platform.
The Verge obtained a recording of Musk’s meeting on Monday. informs Musk’s new Twitter 2.0 vision is a service where private messages are completely private. For Musk, that means all direct messages are encrypted, which is why he plans to work with Signal. According to Musk, Signal is “potentially” interested in helping Musk make sure: “If someone holds a gun to my head, I can’t look at anyone’s DMs.”
Signal told Ars that the company has not held any official talks with Musk.
“Signal did not work with Twitter on this effort,” Signal president Meredith Whittaker told Ars. “We believe more personal communication is a net good, and we’re interested to see how Twitter addresses the complexity of creating encrypted DMs that can be used on the web and mobile devices.”
In addition to encrypted DMs, Musk wants to add encrypted voice and video chat features.
“We want to ensure that users can communicate without worrying about their privacy. [or] Without having to worry about a data breach causing all of their DMs on Twitter to go viral or thinking that someone on Twitter might be spying on their DMs,” Musk told Twitter staff.
For anyone watching, this means that in addition enabling potentially paid features-like basic edits-like DMing a celebrity or watching exclusive videos from content creators Improves Twitter search-and bold ideas Making Twitter the next PayPal— Musk also hopes to make Twitter the primary messenger for users. He told his team he would do this by breaking away from other messaging services and so Twitter users wouldn’t have to share their actual phone numbers to communicate.
“You don’t have to give anybody your phone number,” Musk told employees.
It seems that ideally, in Musk’s world, Twitter handles would become every user’s entire online identity — something worth paying $8 a month for once he figures out this whole impersonation thing.
