New Twitter Blue Service Including Account Verification

Twitter has entered a new era since the original founders of Twitter sold the company to Elon Musk. One of Musk’s first decisions was the revamp of the Twitter Blue service. Twitter Blue will now include verification of your Twitter account. This feature has been one of the most desired Twitter features.

Account Verification - What it is and why it is important

Twitter or account verification is the blue checkmark shown next to the name of a Twitter Account in order to prove a publicly recognizable account’s authenticity. This has been next to most of celebrities, politicians, big brands or other famous organisations and individuals, so that users are able to know that they interact with the official account of this person or brand and not a counterfeit.

The latter has been a huge issue in social media. The reason is that fake accounts that have not been officially created by the respective brand or individual, are created on a daily basis in an effort to impersonate an individual (or brand) or simply created by fans just because of their love about them. In most cases, these accounts have a profile picture of these brands or celebrities which cause confusion for several other users when interacting with them.

Verification of the official accounts with the blue checkmark (or other color recently such as black or white) has always been a great solution to the above problem and has been adopted by Facebook, Instagram or other social media platforms. People can be certain that they interact with the brand or celebrity they want when the check mark is next to the name of any account.

Twitter verification application was included in your app settings until yesterday on iOS. Following the recent app update, the form is no longer available which means that account are unable to request for verification at the moment. Account verification will now be part of the new Twitter Blue service. Users will be able to get verified simply by being subscribed to Twitter Blue. It will be interesting to view Twitter’s new verification criteria, since if everyone can get verified simply by being subscribed to Twitter Blue, then the reason for being verified might not be strong enough anymore.

Twitter Blue New Features & Cost

Initially, Twitter Blue was a monthly subscription service offering access to exclusive features such as undo Tweet, custom app icons, navigation, themes etc at $4.99 / month. It never included account verification though.

Following the recent iOS app update to version 9.34.3, Twitter Blue now includes editing tweets and account verification as part of the new Twitter Blue. The previous application form that allowed users to apply for verification is no longer available.

What will happen with already verified accounts? Already verified accounts need to subscribe to the new Twitter Blue service within 90 days following the new service launch in order to maintain their verification. Otherwise, the checkmark will be lost after this timeframe.

Pricing & Availability

The iOS Twitter app update which includes the revamped Twitter Blue service with account verification features, went live yesterday. The cost of the new service is $7.99/month and it is only available in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand.

However, account verification is still NOT working despite the fact that it is included in the new app release notes. It is expected to go live during next week though. Elon Musk wanted this feature to be available no later than November 7 as reported by the Verge. Hence, the new account verification process will be up and running by that date.

Impact

The impact of this strategy shift from Twitter, which tries to monetize by selling one of the most desirable Twitter features, could change entirely the perception of other social media platforms as well. If this bet from Twitter is won, who can tell that Facebook or Instagram will not copy this and charger their own users to keep their verification status.

This would be interesting but not necessarily fair because the checkmark verification has been used to solve a problem that Twitter or Facebook or any other platform is unable to do so. Why can someone create an account named as Apple, or Coca-Cola or Starbucks? There platforms should have created a mechanism to cope with these issues in their environment. The problem is much more complex though but it would be interesting enough for us to see how this change led by Twitter might affect our social media presence.