New York City — On April 2, Elon Musk called The New York Times news feed diarrhea.
The number of publications out of place from Musk has gone off scale in recent months. Yes, he has made it to be the most followed person on Twitter. But it looks like people are forced to read Elon Musk due to its artificially inflated presence at the very top of the “For you” tab that Twitter keeps choosing for people.
At the same time, Musk does not worry about the quality of content. He took the top with the number of posts. Last couple of weeks he literally turned into a spammer.
Musk’s “Greed Is Good”
The richest man on the planet is begging for money, promoting a monthly verification for 7 bucks. Yes, earlier verification was something about once and with official documents. But now Elon Musk found a new way of monetisation and verification only with subscription on a monthly payment basis.
As a reminder, on April 1, Twitter began to take away blue and gold checks from those who do not meet their new verification program and do not make a monthly payment for a subscription.
Benefit of having blue check is to appear in “For you” tab of those who do not follow you. In other words, verification [or subscription, whatever] is just a paid promotion of your posts for 7 bucks a month. Companies have to pay $1,000 a month to obtain gold checks while individuals can get blue checks for $7 a month in U.S. (price may vary in different countries). And it seems that he had no other option how to get money from people and companies. Does Elon Musk have plan B for monetisation if others will follow the The Times and refuse to pay? Twitter’s P&L has a negative balance. And now the intractable newspaper exacerbates an already bad state of affairs with its bad example. Elon Musk covers up his knocking out money from people with such values as “freedom”, “truth”, and so on.
There’s also another interesting point, Musk calls the publications of The New York Times “propaganda”. The multibillionaire literally trolls those who refuse to play by his rules. He himself may well be called a politically biased publication. He talked a lot about the war between Russia and Ukraine. about the war in Syria, problems with the Iranian nuclear program and the situation in Israel and Palestine. Given his influence, Graham Robertson, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says that with these materials, “Musk sets a precedent for discussion, and he’s good at it.”
The New York Times Response
In response to Elon Musk’s tweet, a spokesperson for The New York Times confirmed a few hours later after Elon’s tweet that the newspaper would not pay a monthly fee to get verified check mark status. Also, a representative confirmed that blue checks for personal accounts will also not be paid, except in rare cases.
At the moment, there is information that Politico will not pay for verification for its employees. There are also rumors that The Los Angeles Times will also refuse verification.
The White House also confirmed that they will not make payments to staff’s official Twitter profiles.
Musk appears to be doing his best to deliver on what he said in December 2022, pushing Twitter towards “approximate cash flow break-even” in 2023 as top advertisers slashed spending on the social media platform after being taken over by the billionaire. And if Musk is not able to reach out to advertisers by providing them with a good service, then he went to ordinary users for money.
