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.
Admittedly, it’s very tinfoil hat - but I honestly believe Elon bought it to sink it.
He’s gotten favorable contracts for more profitable tangible ventures like Starlink from otherwise authoritarian countries over recent years, and I would be willing to bet that he agreed to buy and sink Twitter at the behest of said authoritarian types due to how Twitter has been a tool for not only journalists, but protesters and perhaps most importantly - whistleblowers looking to expose otherwise smoke-screened actions taken by totalitarian states who control their broadcast airwaves and large news sources.
Twitter is… or at least was by design - a platform where anyone could record and upload media of multiple kinds showing actual war crimes being committed with a real possibility of their cries being seen and heard by the whole world in a matter of hours.
Being able to destroy or even just hamper the ability of anyone in any country to do that is probably pretty attractive to types who like to otherwise control the flow of information in their dominions.
Surely there are easier ways to destroy it without making himself look really, really dumb.
I don’t think it’s they deep, I think he’s just quite stupid.
You could be right…
Hanlon’s Razor shouldn’t apply to businessmen because acting machiavellian and feigning ignorance is in their interest. But he has so thoroughly ruined his “real life Iron Man” reputation, that I doubt that this is some master plan. Even his other companies have lost value due to how bad he is fumbling this.
Yeah he definitely could have slowly killed the platform without humiliating himself like he is
Hanlon’s razor is just a bad rule. Applying it would, for instance, let the entire Trump administration off the hook for the way they sabotaged everything they were in charge of. Were incompetent? Mostly, yes. But they were also malicious.
Yeah, Hanlon’s Razor is hardly a rule. But it can help to deal with regular people in your day to day life, rather than sinking into paranoia that everyone is out to get you.
However if we are talking about business and politicians, it’s pretty much their job to get one over people. All the profits and power that they can get is what they squeeze out of you.
And even when it comes to peers, that doesn’t account for prejudice. Someone who otherwise might not knowingly do anything bad to their neighbors might act differently to groups they hate.
Remember back in 2015 ~ 16 when we thought Trump was playing 4d chess, but it turned out he was really actually that dumb all along? It’s the same with Musk. We want to believe that someone who’s had so much success has a secret plan or something, but sometimes they really are just stupid chucklefucks
I’m not saying this to be an asshole, because I’m happy that you got to the right conclusion eventually, but I have to clarify for history’s sake: if you thought Trump was playing 4D chess in 2015-2016 then you were being duped. Most of us understood what he was from the get-go. Claims of 4D chess have always been stupid.
Again, I’m happy that you figured it out. Everyone makes mistakes. But “we” didn’t think he was playing 4D chess. The hypothesis about Musk/Twitter above is hardly the same.
Pleased don’t lump me in with those people, I was only using “we” in the figurative sense. I’ve been anti-trump longer than many people on this site have been alive
Fair enough!
If Elon bought it just to sink it, he would have just bought it, then shut it down.
He’s trying to build his ‘financial superstore’ idea from 20 years ago and it will be disastrous in a way that hasn’t even been seen yet.
Wait until this idiot starts implementing money transactions in Twitter and thousands of users suddenly have their bank accounts drained or worse.
It’s only a matter of time before something so bad happens that all the nonsense that he’s already done will be a footnote to the really big story.
Is he legally allowed to just shut down twitter?
Yes. It’s a private company.
But he has obligations from his debtors
Sure, but that’s another matter. If a laundromat has no desire to operate any longer, does it have to continue just because it has debt? I don’t think so.
sure, but with contracts as big like this, it’s highly likely that there are some special clauses that forbids him from just killing the project outright.
Also, he’d have a hard time coming up with the cash to pay off the 20B+ bucks he borrowed. He’s rich, but not in cash.
(not saying that this is the case at all, the more likelyhood is that he’s just an idiot)
The value of TSLA is more relevant to his debt financing than whether Twitter is operating or not.
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…