Twitter Users Balk at Paying $8 a Month for Musk’s Blue Check

Time is almost up for old-school Twitter blue check marks.

Twitter Inc.’s new owner, Elon Musk, is purging the social network’s free legacy labels as of April 1 and replacing them with a new designation that he says will make the platform more egalitarian and generate much-needed revenue. But legions of users are balking at forking over the $8 a month fee, and some say the pay-to-play system, dubbed Twitter Blue, will make it easier for pranksters, hoaxers or criminals to pose as someone they’re not — potentially facilitating use of the site to spread misinformation and sow discord.

Musk bought Twitter in late October, promising to make it a haven for free speech and battle the bots he said were degrading the social network’s user experience. One of his original promises was that people who previously had been “verified” by the system, for free — a badge of prominence that told others you were real and possibly also famous — would lose their status. Since Musk’s takeover, an increase in offensive speech and fumbles around verification and content moderation have led hundreds of advertisers to pull spending from the platform, causing ad sales to decline by 50%. Paid verification as part of Twitter Blue is an attempt to make up for that lost revenue.