There is a new boss in town, and he comes with new rules as well. Last week, Elon Musk finally completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, after a lengthy period of legal battles. Now, there is a massive shakeup in policy, management, and user base. The latest is that Elon Musk may soon require that verified Twitter users pay a subscription fee to access and keep their verification status. 

Verified Twitter Users to Pay $20 Every Month

As first seen on The Platformer, Twitter has spent the weekend discussing the move and making plans related to the project. In fact, Elon tweeted out too, saying “The whole verification process is being revamped right now.” 

Subscription-based features are currently available to users on the Twitter Blue side of the social media platform. Interested users pay monthly Twitter Blue subscriptions, priced at $4.99. We now learn that Twitter plans to charge $19.99 for the new Twitter Blue subscription. Verified users would have 90 days to subscribe or lose their blue tick.

Start off your week with tech news recap and trending conversations in your inbox

Enter valid email-id

Subscribe

I prefer it on Telegram

More radical changes will happen as Elon Musk settles into his role as the new owner. The Chief Twit– as is the description of himself in his Twitter bio– started massive layoffs on the first day in the office. 

Among the executives fired last week are CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and Legal and policy executive Vijaya Gadde. About 7,500 people currently work at Twitter — and 75 percent of them can expect to be shown the door, The Washington Post reports.

Tesla, SpaceX, and now Twitter Billionaire, has also shown keen interest in issues of free speech and content moderation on the platform. He says that Twitter will form a content moderation council. All major decisions will have to be approved by this council.

To be super clear, we have not yet made any changes to Twitter’s content moderation policies https://t.co/k4guTsXOIu

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 29, 2022

The Verge reports that employees working on the Verification project were told that they need to meet a deadline of November 7th to launch the feature or get fired.