Communications of the ACM
Musk Defends Controversial $20 Blue Checkmark Twitter Plan to Stephen King
Musk wrote directly to Stephen King: “We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot entirely rely on advertisers. How about $8?”
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Elon Musk has responded to Stephen King's horrified reaction at his reported plan to charge all verified users for their blue checkmark — and in the process, confirmed the surprising and controversial idea is in the works.
On Monday, King went viral with his reaction to a report that Musk wanted to charge verified users a whopping $20 per month to keep their checkmark status. "$20 a month to keep my blue check?" King tweeted to his 6.9 million followers. "Fuck that, they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I'm gone like Enron." When a reader told King he could afford the fee, the bestselling author replied, "It ain't the money, it's the principle of the thing."
FiveThirtyEight political guru Nate Silver similarly wrote to his 3.5 million followers: "I'm probably the perfect target for this, use Twitter a ton, can afford $20/mo, not particularly anti-Elon, but my reaction is that I've generated a ton of valuable free content for Twitter over the years and they can go fuck themselves."
Early Tuesday, Musk responded to the uproar, replying directly to King: "We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot entirely rely on advertisers. How about $8?"
From The Hollywood Reporter
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