Brands that don't buy enough Twitter ads will lose verification

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.

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.

adam,
@adam@lakedistrict.social avatar

@NevermindNoMind is getting desperate now.

theneverfox,
@theneverfox@pawb.social avatar

More than that.

He’s dispelling the myth of the billionaire businessman. He could show up quite a lot in all sorts of history books

Buttons,
@Buttons@programming.dev avatar

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:

  1. Allow yourself to lose verification.
  2. 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.
  3. Sue Twitter since they have verified the fake account and removed verification of the real account, and are thus committing libel.
Hankaaron,

Step 2 is illegal and not realistic. But honestly someone will prob do that for big brands anyway so same logic applies anyway

tryptaminev,

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.

DavidW,

@NevermindNoMind sucks anyway. It lost its charm ever since that took over!

bloodravenlib,
@bloodravenlib@mas.to avatar

@NevermindNoMind

What happens when you don't pay. . .

>Bomb scene, from the film The Untouchables.
https://youtu.be/230tT50QPko

mpjames,
@mpjames@glasgow.social avatar

@NevermindNoMind And, presumably, the brands will also lose an incentive to stay on the platform, especially now that it’s in the progress of re-branding as not-Twitter?

gumchops,

At this point I am ready to start boycotting businesses that are still on that crap platform in the first place.

UncleGooberleg,

I’m in favor of anything that helps me avoid buying from assholes.

HawlSera,

Speedrunning the collapse of the Corponet

MaxPow3r11,

“I just reinstated a pedophile. Now pay me to put your ads on my SHIT” ~Elon “fascists are my best and only friends” Musk

Nerorero,
@Nerorero@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

South park couldn’t come up with this level of “because x therefore x”

JackbyDev,

X* ads.

ChaoticEntropy,
@ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk avatar

Sooo… blackmail/coercion then…?

“Be a shame if you lost control of your brand on my platform, be a damn shame…”

arc,

Controversial idea but maybe federated servers should think of some way of delivering federated advertising. Some way to fund the model in a fair and equitable way while draw away funding that goes into Twitter or other social media platforms. Doesn’t stop people blocking it of course.

TwilightVulpine,

We do need to think about how to keep the Fediverse running, but advertising shouldn’t be federated. If an instance wants to run ads that’s fine, but that shouldn’t be distributed to any other instances, not even if the posts and users engage with other instances. Who is going to want to see or redistribute ads for a different instance?

arc,

Like I said, controversial but it’s quite reasonable for the operators of these servers to want to raise money somehow. Even if the activity pub feed describes elements with a “this is an ad” tag and allows the recipient to choose whether to serve it or not.

chicken,
@chicken@lemmy.world avatar

beehaw has donations and releases regular reports of how its being spent, I think that model is pretty good. from what ive seen they always get more than enough needed.

schmorpel,

No please let’s just make it not a thing anymore to finance stuff with advertising. I’m happy to support an instance I enjoy spending time on with volunteering service and/or money, but I’m here exactly because I don’t want to see ads. I’m right now a happy human, commenting on a post on the internet, without a need in the world and I don’t want to see any text, picture or video on my screen that suggests otherwise.

MilitantAtheist,

Imagine what this must look like on the inside.

You’re a software engineer at Twitter. You keep getting these weird tasks that you know are stupid, but you keep doing them just to see where the hell this bullshit will end up.

Zetaphor,

And you haven’t already quit because you’re on an H1B/GC visa, and so your residence in the US is tied to your employment, effectively making you a corporate owned slave.

SCB,

TIL people deported their slaves when they were unruly.

hup,
@hup@lemmy.world avatar

This is how distopias happen. Hell this is how fascism sneaks up on people if they aren’t paying close attention.

Hamartiogonic,
@Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz avatar

At that point you’re not even going to try to explain it to your boss any more. Just watching the whole thing burn might be more entertaining than trying to save it from certain destruction.

krakenx,

Imagine being the person who last Sunday night got the call from Elon “I really like this random X logo. Redo the entire site right now and remove all of the birds and blue theming, and have it live in production by tomorrow morning.”

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