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.
Bro what is elon doing???
Since he started his act about buying Twitter I saw that as a personal vendetta to harm it - the ultimate tantrum for being mocked at there and not being under his control. He said he’d buy then backed off just to hurt Twitter’s value, but then when he was forced to buy it for the first offer value, he got even more butthurt.
It’s pretty clear that everything he’s done since is to get revenge and destroy it. It’s insane that some people keep praising his decisions towards Twitter as anything but ridiculous.
He’s the rich brat who doesn’t get brown nosed by the waiter in front of his date, then proceed to buy the restaurant just to fire the guy.
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.
I suppose… but I guess I still somehow give him too much credit.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.
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.
Eh, with Elon, I prefer to assume stupidity over malice, because he also had already done shit to hurt his own image before he owned Twitter. Who was he being malignant against then? Himself? To own, uh, his supported??? Everything falls in place by just doing the single logical step of “he dumdum”.
What about stupid malice, or maliciously stupid? :-)
Does a bully think being a bully hurts their image?
As an extreme narcissist, he can’t fathom the idea that anything he does can hurt his image. Surrounded by devoted minions, everything he does boosts his ego. He’s mauling Twitter, and thinks this projects a powerful image of himself.
I never liked this guy, I think he’s an narcissistic spoiled brat, but even then I can’t believe he could possibly be so stupid to think that things like throwing away the Twitter brand for “X” make sense.
Didn’t he offer to buy it so he could sell a bunch of tesla shares without sinking the value? And then he tried to back out, but was forced to buy it.
Saudi Arabia put up 20 billion or so of the 44 he used to purchase twitter. The reason behind this is widely speculated to be Saudi Arabia wanting to destroy twitter because it was instrumental in the Arab Spring uprising.
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Have you heard of MBS? He’s…something.
They would’ve had to convince Musk though to take a huge hit to his credibility and ego with this, which I can’t see him agreeing to.
Extorting his advertisers, it seems. It’s hella funny.
Because he knows nobody is going to want to buy more ad space on a site that is (or at least was) restricting how many posts users can scroll through.
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The most generous thing I can think of is that it’s a social experiment to see just how many ways he can undercut a successful brand and platform before it completely implodes.
tHe SmArTeSt MaN iN tHe UnIvErSe. Doing small brain things again
He previously said that Twitter was in the red when he bought it. So pretty much everything he’s been doing has been clearly aimed at either reducing Twitter’s expenses or increasing its revenue. Better to have a smaller company that is profitable than a bigger company that is not profitable.
Whether it’s working or not, time will tell. But that’s the likely motivation behind most of it.
He’s got a really big loan payment to pay in October, everything is about that to keep it going for another year
Something about this move makes me feel like he was bragging to somebody about how he managed to own a single letter domain, and his conversation ended up somehow here, with him doubling down on what wasn’t even a good joke to begin with.
This is purely speculative, obviously, but it just makes me think it’s him putting his money where his mouth is to save face to someone else (who is likely bemused at best)
He’s playing with his new middle age crisis toy. Cars and spaceships got boring.
Just a few more failed businesses and in about 50 years he’ll be all set to run for POTUS as the Republican nominee.
What a shame he was born in South Africa and isn’t eligible.
I’m sure the Republicans would just come out of the woodwork and ask “Oh, but what about Obama, how come he can run for POTUS then?”. Which is, of course, something I already seen someone ask. Wasn’t even some old person from “different times” or whatever, this person genuinely just had no justifiable reason to be this racist.
I’m not American but I confess I’m relieved that he can’t do that. Just try to imagine someone like him being able to fire nukes.
We dont have to imagine given that Trump was president for 4 horrible years.
Musk strikes me as being potentially even worse than him, though
That’s okay. He can’t be president unless they change the U.S. constitution or something.
Rather more realistically, they just have to reinterpret the constitution, a much lower bar.
What makes you think he can’t, and won’t, do that?
He’s not a natural born citizen of the United States of America.
The constitution never actually defines what natural born is. So it would be entirely up to SCOTUS. The same SCOTUS that currently has several GOP members being openly bribed for decisions. For shockingly lower amounts than you’d expect.
Aha yeah I forgot about that weird rule
What makes it weird? What countries allow naturalized citizens run for president? (Genuinely curious)
How’s he doing on rapes, domestic violence, and paying for abortions? That’s still a requirement for that party last I checked
Ah, that’s a good point. Well, he’s still got ~50 years to work on those if he hasn’t started yet.
Wait, wait, wait, lemme get this right.
Problem: They were low or revenue.
Response: Increase API costs
Problem: API costs are too high
Response: People started scrapping Twitter
Problem: People are scrapping the site
Response: Make users sign in to view tweets
Problem: People have to sign in to see any ads too
Response: Tell companies that if they don’t spend enough on ads they will lose verification.
I mean, what’s next?
Problem: Brands start leaving Twitter
Solution: Increase the price of Twitter Blue
Problem: Decrease of Twitter Blue subscribers
Solution: Sue every other competitor for alleged infringing Twitter’s trade secrets
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wait wait wait, lemmy get this right
The pun was there the whole time!
People wanting a blue checkmark must own a Tesla.
I mean I would but they’re all getting recalled :(. Jk. I’d never buy one of those shit boxes.
What’s next is Elon standing at a red light holding a piece of cardboard telling you to buy Twitter Blue or he’ll key your car
It’s called X blue now. Because that’s the colour of the… oh.
But I don’t know why she swallowed the fly
Perhaps she’ll die
Imagine losing your arbitrary blue check mark because you didn’t buy enough ads on a platform that no one really uses anyway.
Isnt it used by 350 million plus people?
Ironically, Musk also wanted us to believe that 50% of those were bots just a couple months ago…
This look more and more like a speedrun on how to bring down a well established platform in under a year.
Like a real life Brewster’s Billions
Getting low on popcorn…
Have you tried demanding $1000 of popcorn or you’ll stop eating?
I have not. Given the likelihood of getting what I’m asking for, might be a means of losing weight.
Someone was dropped on his head as a junior billionaire.
So Elon is now going for the severed horse head under the bedsheets approach to persuade advertisers?
That’s a bold move.
Is bold the word we’re looking for here? It’s definitely A move.
If I were a business that is under threat of this, my response would be “ok.”. No business that actually cares about its image should promote on a website that’s filled to the brim with bigots and nazis
That’ll bring your advertisers back
Every day I think the dumpster fire can’t get any bigger and every day I’m proven wrong.
Imagine what this must look like on the inside.
You’re a software engineer at Twitter. You keep getting these weird tasks that you know are stupid, but you keep doing them just to see where the hell this bullshit will end up.
Imagine being the person who last Sunday night got the call from Elon “I really like this random X logo. Redo the entire site right now and remove all of the birds and blue theming, and have it live in production by tomorrow morning.”
This is how distopias happen. Hell this is how fascism sneaks up on people if they aren’t paying close attention.
The “X” stands for Extortion.
I’m sure the ego-less CEOs in large corporations will take kindly to being extorted. (/s)
How to shut down a well established business under an year.
I mean, well-established is a stretch…
Risky? More like suicidal. The Twitter brand hasn’t so much been tarnished as blown to pieces by Elon Musk. If he thinks he’s in a position to make demands of advertisers, when advertisers are already in life rafts heading for the shoreline, well, good luck with that. Have that band you’re not paying play you off, because you’re going down with the ship, and the advertisers aren’t going with you.
