Starting August 7th, advertisers that haven’t reached certain spending thresholds will lose their official brand account verification. According to emails obtained by the WSJ, brands need to have spent at least $1,000 on ads within the prior 30 days or $6,000 in the previous 180 days to retain the gold checkmark identifying that the account belongs to a verified brand.
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Threatening to remove verified checkmarks is a risky move given how many ‘Twitter alternative’ services like Threads and Bluesky are cropping up and how willing consumers appear to be to jump ship, with Threads rocketing to 100 million registrations in just five days. That said, it’s not like other efforts to drum up some additional cash, like increasing API pricing, have gone down especially well, either. It’s a bold strategy, Cotton — let’s see if it pays off for him.
Having never been on twitter myself I’m especially entertained, watching and laughing from a far corner of the internet
Twitter has a bad reputation from the “buzzworthy” people. It was nowhere near as bad as the terminally online would have you believe. I’d even say it was a GREAT site before 2016.
It’s a social media platform. You (used to) choose whose tweets you saw. As such, it was easy to curate your account to stick to one kind of content. I never saw politics or sports, I only followed funny people. And I had every major brand straight up blocked
The 140 character days were like text Vine where you made a joke through constraints and I loved it
Notably, Vine was created by Twitter.
And then Vine was axed by Twitter. (One of the dumbest mistakes Twitter ever made - look how successful TikTok is, and think that Twitter literally had that a decade ago and decided to shut it down.)
So really, Vine was just video Twitter, instead of Twitter being text Vine.
I wasn’t really involved with social media back then sadly, but yes I did get that general impression. Before all the toxicity really overtook it around 2020 it did seem quite pleasant.
Shame really, corporate greed taking something quite nice and milking it so hard it’s absolutely ruined. Then again, it gives way to things like bluesky so i guess it has its upsides!
See that’s the thing …toxicity DIDN’T take over, you just heard about it more.
This internet hate machine loves to pretend that the angry tweet screenshots they see reposted over and over are representative of the site as a whole while all the funny tweet screenshots they’ve laughed at are one in a million. But if you look at the usernames on the political ones it’s usually the same handful of people…like that guy who starts every other tweet with “Holy fucking shit, Trump just…” Or the Brooklyn dad guy
A suspended account can’t be deleted without appealing your suspension, and I’m pretty sure no one even looks at those with Musk in charge.
So suspending accounts keep them as users. They’re not active users, but it’s better than nothing.
And honestly wouldn’t be the craziest shit Elon’s done this week. So he might actually be randomly suspending accounts to lock them in
