Would you pay for a verification of your twitter account?

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It didn’t take long for Elon Musk to show what he wants to do with his newly acquired social media company.
This week he announced that he would seek to charge $8 a month for Twitter’s subscription service, called “Twitter Blue,” with the promise to let anyone pay to receive a coveted blue check mark to verify their account.

In a tweet, the world’s richest man used an expletive to describe his assessment of “Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark.” He added: “Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.”
According to internal Twitter planning documents reported by CNN, Twitter could also take away the blue check marks of currently verified users if they don’t start paying the higher $19.99 price for the subscription product within 90 days.

The news quickly prompted outrage and disbelief among some longtime Twitter users, including author Stephen King, who has nearly seven million followers on the platform. “$20 a month to keep my blue check?” he tweeted on Monday, followed by an expletive. “They should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.” Following up later in a reply, King wrote, “[i]t ain’t the money, it’s the principle of the thing.”

Musk’s idea is that with this measure he would eliminate the numerous false accounts that have been a problem in various campaigns.

But would you pay it?

Jason Calacanis, an American businessman and partner of Musk, has recently launched a Twitter poll asking “How much would you pay to get verified and get a blue check mark on Twitter?”. 82% of respondents have voted that they would not pay a monthly fee for their verified account.

In this way, many users wonder what will happen in the hypothetical case that an unverified account pays the required monthly fee to become an official profile and changes its name to impersonate another person. It is not known for sure if the requirements demanded by the company imposed until now will be maintained, because all users who pay to obtain the blue check would cause an increase in false accounts. However, Musk replies that “that already happens frequently.”