Elon Musk's taking over Twitter has dominated the headlines for the last couple of days. The new Twitter boss has already made some drastic changes, laying off the top execs, including CEO Parag Agarwal, but there's more to come. After refuting reports that he planned to lay off Twitter employees before November 1 in order to stop them from receiving stock grants as part of their year-end compensation, a new report has emerged claiming Musk has threatened to fire Twitter engineers if they fail to meet a deadline on a new project.
Musk is now revamping the process of getting the coveted "blue tick" on Twitter profiles. As a part of the changes, the blue tick would be limited to Twitter Blue subscribers and the subscription charges would go as high as $20 (around Rs 1,600) from the current $4.99 a month, which is optional. The development was reported by the Verge citing people familiar with the matter and "internal correspondence."
The blue tick, which signifies a verified account, is currently free and given after an account is manually reviewed and verified by Twitter. Having a verified account on Twitter signals to users that your profile is credible and authentic. With the new changes in the verification process, it is unclear if the vetting process would get lenient or stringent.
"Pay up or lose blue tick"
The new changes would also affect existing verified accounts. As per the report, verified users would be given 90 days to subscribe to the Twitter Blue subscription or lose their blue tick.
Twitter Blue is an existing service, which was launched almost a year ago. It allows user to view ad-free articles from select publishers and unlock many features like changing colour home screen icon, undo or edit tweet, customise the navigation bar, and more.
"Do it or you're fired"
According to Verge, Musk has Twitter engineers working on this new change on priority. In fact, he has set a strict deadline of November 7, which is when the new feature will be launched. The employees were told on Sunday that in the event the engineers fail to deliver, they will be fired.
Besides firing the top execs, Musk also quietly made a change to Twitter's homepage. According to The Verge, Musk requested that the Explore page which displays trending tweets and news stories, be redirected to the logged-out users visiting Twitter.com. Before the change, the platform's homepage used to display just a sign-up form when logged out which encouraged users to create accounts in order to access tweets. With less than three days under his belt as "Chief Twit", Musk has already begun to quickly transform the company from the inside out, as evidenced by his modification of Twitter's homepage.
