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Sign-ups to Elon Musk’s flagship premium subscription service, Twitter Blue, were put on hold just days into its launch, after its “blue tick” feature was abused by impersonators on the platform.
Since his $44bn buyout of the social media company two weeks ago, the billionaire entrepreneur had ordered Twitter staff to work round the clock to roll out a new version of Twitter Blue for $7.99, which would allow users to pay to have the “blue tick” symbol on their account previously available only to verified companies, politicians, celebrities and journalists.
After launching the service on Wednesday, the platform became flooded by accounts attempting to impersonate well-known brands and figures.
These included a fake Eli Lilly account that posted that the drugmaker was giving away free insulin, garnering thousands of likes and responses, and an account posing as Lockheed Martin that claimed the company was halting weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, Israel and the US pending an investigation in their human rights records. Shares in Eli Lilly dropped 6 per cent on Friday in the wake of Thursday’s impersonation tweet.
In a Slack message, first reported by Platformer, staffers were told that new sign-ups for Twitter Blue had been paused while the impersonation issues are addressed, but that existing users of the service would continue to keep its features, said two people familiar with the situation.
Numerous users who had yet to sign up to the Blue service reported that they were unable to do so on Friday.
The botched rollout is likely to exacerbate growing concerns among brands about whether Twitter is a safe place to advertise or post, given Musk’s previous pledges to relax content moderation rules and allow users who had been permanently banned to return.
The “brand safety” concerns have prompted numerous companies to pause their spending, including General Motors, Carlsberg and General Mills — which Musk last week said had led to a “massive drop in revenue”.
Musk said in a tweet on Friday that Twitter Blue “needs some tweaks, but [was] overall proceeding well”.
On Wednesday, the company also attempted to launch a second “Official” label for brands, governments and high-profile individuals, but it was paused within hours. By Friday, Twitter staffers were told the labels were live again but only being allocated to advertisers, according to Platformer and confirmed by two people.
“To combat impersonation, we’ve added an ‘Official’ label to some accounts,” a tweet from Twitter Support said late on Thursday.
The Twitter Blue issues cap a bruising week for Musk, who on Thursday suffered an exodus of remaining top executives and warned bankruptcy was a possibility.
In an all-hands meeting with some engineering staff on Thursday, Musk warned the company might have net negative cash flow of several billion dollars, adding that bankruptcy was not out of the question, according to a person familiar with the matter. The comments were first reported by The Information.
Yoel Roth, head of trust and safety, chief information security officer Lea Kissner, and chief privacy officer Damien Kieran left on Thursday, a week after Musk laid off half of Twitter’s then 7,500 workforce, raising questions about who was running the ship and attracting scrutiny from regulators.
On Thursday, the Federal Trade Commission said that it was “tracking recent developments at Twitter with deep concern”. The social media company signed a consent decree with the FTC in 2011 pledging to better protect user data, which the regulator continues to oversee.
The Irish Data Protection Commission, the lead European privacy watchdog, on Friday said it was meeting with Twitter on Monday to discuss fresh concerns about its compliance with privacy rules.
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Image and article originally from www.ft.com. Read the original article here.