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.
But why? If Twitter is something he and his friends do not like it would be a better move to censor everything instead of pushing the users to other Twitter alternatives and spread the same message over there. Controlling is more valuable than pushing the users away.
Because, as an authoritarian regime, there is no way to meaningfully control and censor twitter unless you take the Great Firewall of China approach and even then, that is a very difficult to implement solution.
So the next best solution for an authoritarian to stop an unwanted message from spreading is destroying the platform, even better if it’s through a private, tenuously connected proxy, who you could plausibly deny connection to.
there is no way that rich people could be some form of authoritarian aristocracy that sees themselves as divinely ordained the most capable leaders in existence because they have a lot of money and act on this belief…