Twitter announced on Saturday that it would charge customers $7.99 a month to get a verification check mark on their profile, one of several product changes the company has discussed since its acquisition of Elon Musk just over a week ago.
The announcement is contained in notes in a new update of the Twitter app that appeared in Apple’s App Store. The notes explained that the paid verification system was now a feature of the website’s subscription service, Twitter Blue.
“Power to the people,” the announcement read. “Your account will get a blue check, as will the celebrities, companies and politicians you already follow.”
To fund his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, Mr. Musk loaded the company with $13 billion in debt, which comes with more than $1 billion in interest payments. That has put Twitter under enormous pressure to cut costs and increase revenue. This week, Twitter laid off about half of the company’s workforce, or about 3,700 jobs.
In addition to charging verification, Mr. Musk and his advisors have weighed in on a host of other ideas for monetizing, from putting certain videos behind paywalls to reviving Vine, the now-defunct short-lived video platform. form.
The update notes revealed on Saturday also promised that subscribers would receive other benefits, including “half the ads and much better ones,” as well as the ability to post longer videos to Twitter.
And in a series of tweets on Saturday, Mr. Musk said the company was working on an update that would give users the ability to add long text to tweets, which he said would “eliminate the absurdity of notepad screenshots.”
But the change to Twitter’s signature verification system has proved particularly controversial. In the past, the company manually assigned a blue circle with a white check mark to high-profile figures and companies. With the midterm elections approaching Tuesday, some proponents of electoral integrity have expressed: fears that the new paid verification system could make it easier for bad actors to impersonate political candidates or other public figures.
