Originally published at: New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Buzzfeed say they won't pay for Twitter verification | Boing Boing
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But will they sue if someone impersonates them?
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They’re orgs, wouldn’t it be $1000+ / month?
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They should all set up their own official instances of Mastodon for their reporters and editors. It won’t cost them much, moderation of their staff won’t be difficult, and they can still cross-post on Twitter until its demise.
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Post.news seems to have monetization for news organizations built in already, I’ve seen a few news providers using that. Much less confusing than Mastodon, and there’s a lot of advantage in a one-stop approach rather than each newspaper having their own Mastodon server. They already have their own web sites.
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… and apparently it can save your bacon. The Texas Observer managed to dodge cancellation on the strength of their Mastodon instance and crowd funding.
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It’s such a losing strategy. There aren’t enough newspapers to go around, they can’t afford to pay their reporters as it is, and the number of news organizations is shrinking. This would not get them even $1M a month in news providers. The other big market for Twitter Gold is major brands, and their money is better spent in the advertising that they’ve already pulled out due to brand safety concerns.
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The real money is in getting giant conglomerates like Kraft Heinz to pay $1000/month/brand to have an inactive account that can’t get claimed by a neo-nazi with $8 to burn. Extortion might be their most viable business plan.
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And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the paywall that is in thine own eye?
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This is going to kill a lot of the actual utility of Twitter, isn’t it? It’s like Musk failed to understand the actual value of the blue checks.
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Post.News will be a good solution for media outlets and corporate communications departments once it implements ActivityPub. That way announcements about new articles on the platform can be pushed out regularly to consumers using Mastodon and other Fediverse platforms.
I’'m not so thrilled that it’s yet another centralised and closed-source platform with social media aspects (e.g. engagement algorithms, potential sales of user data, etc.), but if it provides the outlets with a convenient way for consumers to pay for content it’s worth a shot.
ETA: meanwhile, Musk is already walking things back.
Twitter also plans to charge organizations $1,000 a month to be verified, but will make exceptions for its top 500 advertisers and for the 10,000 most-followed organizations that have been previously verified, according to an internal document seen by The Times. All accounts that purchase check marks will be reviewed to make sure they are not impersonating someone, according to the document.
[Archive]
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(excerpt) It is rare for chief executives at companies to try to meet with the F.T.C.’s chair and commissioners while an inquiry is underway. But such meetings sometimes occur when the executives hope to convince the agency’s top officials that they are committed to abiding by their promises to the F.T.C.
He so wants to meet Lina face to face. I smell Musk seeking to get within effective range to imply a tactically nebulous and totally deniable hint of bribery.
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I’m wondering whether Twitter will claim, the next time an impersonation event turns into a lawsuit, that the victim could have avoided someone else impersonating them by paying for a checkmark. (The counter argument would be all the recent/current paid checkmark impersonators - they claim identity verification will be part of the new system for all checkmarks, but I don’t see that happening.) Blowing up an identity verification system that worked, just to extort money from notable people, even if the new system works (which again, I doubt it will), doesn’t seem like a great defense.
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Mastodon also has free and instantaneous verification for everyone.
It’s technically just link verification: if you own or control the website in the info box it’ll be green (the checkmarks are just custom emoji) but that’s enough to prove you’re you if it’s obviously your website.
And it has an edit feature.
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It almost doesn’t matter if this is deliberate sabotage by Musk or the blundering stupidity of a clueless idiot. The upshot is the same: Twitter is dying.
If you have any technical chops at all and have given even a few moments thought to his “projects” of the last several years along with his insanely hyperbolic promises, then it’s easy to know the correct answer. (It’s “number two”-- which also describes the quality of his thought.)
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He had me at “direct[ing] his engineers to create a feature allowing Twitter Blue users to conceal their checkmarks.”
So it’s turning into that other platform whose name I’ve already forgotten?
LOL Kanye.
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He was going to offer her a horse.
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