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.
I heard that Twitter originally added verification because they were getting sued over imposters, so they added verification to delegitimize imposters and thus give less reason for others to sue them.
Now Musk is getting rid of verification en masse, so the original reason for the lawsuits will return.
Here’s how to play it if you’re a business who loses your Twitter verification:
- Allow yourself to lose verification.
- Make a backroom deal with some random person, have that person make a fake account for your business and buy verification. Have the person post some bad things under their fake and verified account.
- Sue Twitter since they have verified the fake account and removed verification of the real account, and are thus committing libel.
Step 2 is illegal and not realistic. But honestly someone will prob do that for big brands anyway so same logic applies anyway
As if large businesses care about what is legal. They only care if they can’t get away with it and if the costs for fines etc. exceed the revenue made by the violation.
But nobody needs to buy the Ads tobact as an imposter, since that was working w.o. verification already.
