Speaker 1: You know, I should really count up all the times that we've talked about
Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter this year on the show and on the bonus show, because it seems like
every other day we've been talking about this whole saga because before the deal was made,
there was all this back and forth. There were questions about whether Elon could actually
buy Twitter and that if he could back out from the deal. And then ever since he's taken over,
there's been all these updates as to what the hell is happening over at that company. And I find it
important to provide the updates because it's one of these things where you have this high profile
person, the richest person on the planet, taking control of one of the most important social media
sites. And he's been making a lot of mistakes and costing himself and the company a lot of money in
the process. And there's this question now over whether Twitter will be able to survive. And it's
turned into this total cesspool lately because of the low staff and low level of enforcement. Well,
the latest stories that Twitter is going to be relaunching its verification program this week.
Earlier this month, you may remember that Twitter changed from having those coveted blue checks,
verifying high profile figures being something. That was instituted automatically for people
with a big audience to something that you could pay $8 a month for, even though even if you're
not some high profile figure yourself. As long as you're willing to pay up,
you could get that highly coveted blue check. Now, the first draft of this proposal failed
miserably because with the rollout and the lack of moderation, there was just a great deal of
impersonation accounts with people paying for the blue check and it became clear you just wouldn't
be able to trust anyone with this new system. You couldn't tell if people were actually who they say
they were. Then Ellen jumped in and said that impersonators and parody accounts would receive
a permanent suspension with no warning. You had people impersonating Ellen himself, and you had
one account impersonating the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, which tweeted that insulin was free,
causing the company's stock to take a nosedive. So it's all had some great consequences and it's all
been chaos. And even aside from all of this is the reality that, you know, it's really taking
the whole point of being verified if you can just pay for the service because like, there's really
not that much clout to being able to afford the $8 a month charge. And at the same time, like
the point of verification is to to to know with certainty that people are who they are.
You take that away if it's something that people can just pay for. And there's really no sense in
just an average Joe being verified because who's trying to impersonate their account to begin with?
Nobody. So Ellen has been making so many different mistakes. Now what he's trying to do is add this
color coded system for verification. He tweeted recently, Sorry for the delay. We're tentatively
launching Verified on Friday next week. Gold check for companies GRE check for government,
blue for individuals, celebrity or not, and all verified accounts will be manually authenticated
before check activates. Painful but necessary. So from that post, it's unclear how exactly their
verification process is going to work. And if you're even improving anything from the first
round, that was a total disaster. Like maybe an individual user will no longer be able to pretend
to be a company or a government agency, but that doesn't help all that much because there's
still plenty of celebrities that they can still impersonate because they will have the same color
check as the people who were high profile. I think this idea altogether is a total mess. Like I think
you need a verification process so that news outlets and just everyday people can know that
when they see someone is tweeting something, that it's actually that person and not someone else.
Another problem Twitter will continue to have is all of these employees leaving. How are you
going to have enough people to manually verify all of these different accounts? It just sounds
like a total nightmare. We know, of course, that Elon's goal behind launching this paid
service was to increase revenue over that the company, because they've been having difficulty
doing that. And when you're subject to the whims of advertisers, it means that you're not well
diversified as a as a company because, you know, you're just not all that recession proof. Like
if companies have less money to advertise, then your revenue will plummet. And I'm certain that
that probably happened this year with the scaled down in the economy that took place in 2022. So
maybe they want to just open up other streams of income so you can be a little bit more well
balanced. But it doesn't necessarily mean that this is the right way to go about doing it. This
never seemed to be the solution to me anyway. Paying for verification, especially when you
look into the numbers like there are apparently about 200 million Twitter users and they say
that that doesn't really include dead accounts and accounts that people haven't used in a long
time. But I think the realistic number is probably significantly less than that. And if if you also
have like a smaller portion of people who are willing to actually pay for the Twitter blue,
how much money are you really going to be able to raise from this system? Is it going to be anything
that compares to the $5 billion of revenue that you did in 2021? Is it going to make that much
of a difference? And if so, does it make up for the lack of credibility that you have,
the sort of trustworthiness that you give up by changing this verification system over? My sense
is that it's probably not going to be worth it. But Elon is trying he's trying to come up with
innovative ideas to bring about an extra stream of revenue coming in. But this one seems to be
a total disaster and it doesn't seem like it's working well and that if people are open to it.