No, it’s not the free users affected by the changes, but Twitter Blue users (that’s the only way to edit your tweets…).

Elon Musk now owns Twitter and got rid of the company’s top management right away, but that was just the beginning. At first, he planned to raise the price of Twitter Blue, which currently costs five dollars a month, to twenty dollars a month, but that was a bit much. Musk’s task is not an easy one: he has to present a strategy to increase the monetizable user base (=collect money from more people) while not crossing the line with advertisers who are worried about content moderation (it will benefit China, which is well integrated into the social networking site).

Musk thinks it’s horse manure to have the lords and peasants now when it comes to the certified (blue tick) system and wanting to empower people. Therefore, he is raising the price of Twitter Blue not to $20 a month but to $8, which is still a 60% price increase from $5. The price may vary from country to country, taking purchasing power parity into account.

What is Musk offering for it? Priority will be given to subscribers in replies, mentions, and searches (i.e. their name will pop up higher), which he says is essential to beat spammers and scammers. They can upload longer videos and audio (currently, videos can be up to two minutes and twenty seconds long) and see half the number of adverts compared to free users. Suppose there is a publisher that would work with them. In that case, a paywall bypass could allow content creators to monetize their activity. The secondary tag under the name (e.g. US government official) that we have seen with politicians could also appear for more well-known people.

According to Bloomberg, Twitter’s internal moderation tools have been left available to about 15 people, and so far hundreds have had access. Twitter’s Trust and Safety team questioned, as there are midterm elections in the United States in a few days, making the platform less likely to moderate false information. Another side effect? According to Bloomberg, users wrote 1700% (!) more slurs on Friday and Saturday…

The future of Twitter will be interesting…

Source: WCCFTech