Elon Musk holds off Twitter’s Blue Verified relaunch

Twitter’s new boss Elon Musk said on Monday that the company is holding off the relaunch of its $8 Blue Verified service ‘’until there is high confidence of stopping impersonation.’’

The controversial subscription plan was launched earlier this month, but resulted in many users impersonating celebrities, politicians and organizations. The billionaire previously said the plan would be relaunched on November 29 ‘’to make sure that it is rock solid’’, but the new announcement suggests that the process could take longer than that.

He also said that the company is planning to offer different colors for organizations and individual users, in an effort to prevent misuse. 

Earlier this month, in response to a tweet targeting the $8 Twitter Blue plan, Musk said that ‘’Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers’’ and  they ‘’need to pay the bills somehow’’.

Due to content moderation concerns and the uncertainty about the company’s future, many advertisers including General Motors, Audi, United Airlines, Pfizer, General Mills and Mondelez International pulled their ads from the platform. However, according to a recent research from MediaRadar, Twitter began losing advertisers months before the $44 billion takeover.

The company also laid off nearly half of its workforce earlier this month, and hundreds of others reportedly resigned last Thursday after Musk’s “hardcore” work ultimatum. 

Meanwhile, a growing number of users are also exploring other platforms like Mastodon, Tumblr and Hive in search for a better alternative. According to a recent report from Sensor Tower, Mastodon saw a 657% growth in downloads and Tumblr’s global installs increased by 77% in the 12 days following Musk’s takeover.

However, that didn’t prevent Twitter from growing its userbase. The same report also suggests that Twitter’s mobile app downloads rose 21% at the same time.

Also Read: Twitter Revenue and Usage Statistics

The social media platform added 1.6 million daily active users during the last week hitting another all time high, the billionaire said earlier today.