Twitter Blue Check Removal: Elon Musk needs journalists more than he thinks

Twitter delivers only a fraction of traffic to news sites compared with Meta Platforms Inc’s Facebook and what is known as “dark social” — things like email or WhatsApp messages where people might share news links. (Representational Image)

I accidentally removed my “verified” status on Twitter when I changed my username to reflect that I now work at Bloomberg Opinion. After a decade among the blue-tick elites, I was back with the mortals. But where I’ve bravely gone, others must soon follow: From April 20, Elon Musk’s Twitter will remove blue checkmarks from “legacy” verified accounts — unless they pay up.

That’s the plan at least. It’s not the first time Musk has threatened such a step, only to stall. But assuming his (heavily diminished) engineering team has figured out how to make the changes, we can expect blue ticks to begin disappearing across the network on Thursday. It affects everyone on the platform, but it poses a particular dilemma for one extremely prominent constituency: media organisations.

The time for sitting on the fence over Musk’s Twitter is coming to an end. Editors and executives now must decide whether to line the pockets of the world’s second-richest man in order to keep verified status and maintain visibility on the platform. Or they can take a more principled stand and refuse to pay for the privilege of adding immense value to Musk’s business.

Perhaps it helps to know that, to put it succinctly enough to tweet, Twitter needs the media more than the media needs Twitter.

Look at it in blunt business terms. As well as increasing the likelihood of impersonation and fake accounts, Thursday’s planned change will also see non-verified users excluded from the algorithmically sorted “For You” tab — the part of Twitter that serves up “good” tweets from accounts you don’t follow. After deploying several curious strategies for Twitter Blue, this finally sounds like a perk of paid verification that makes sense. Companies, after all, care about reach and influence.

Yet to gain verified status as an organisation in the US, according to this price list, companies must pay a base rate of $1,000, plus $50 per “seat” (account) per month. For The New York Times, which lists 43 official brand accounts, that would mean just over $3,000 per month, not including any of its most prominent reporters, such as Maggie Haberman, who has 1.6 million followers. (Individual journalists can choose to pay personally for their own $8 standard blue tick, but several organisations, including Bloomberg News, are not allowing reporters to expense Twitter Blue subscriptions.)

A March report from the New York Times, citing internal documents, suggested Twitter may waive the fee for the "top 10,000" organisations by follower count. But the terms of this offer, and how it will be implemented, have not yet been made clear. Large publishers I have been in touch with, with huge numbers of followers across brands, have been told they need to pay.

When the New York Times said it wouldn’t pay, Musk removed its verification immediately. The cost calculation could be summed up by the newspaper’s executive editor, Joseph Kahn: “I think we all just became too attuned to the media side of Twitter,” he said at a recent journalism conference, “which really isn’t representative of the broad American public.”

Twitter delivers only a fraction of traffic to news sites compared with Meta Platforms Inc’s Facebook and what is known as “dark social” — things like email or WhatsApp messages where people might share news links — according to the analytics group Chartbeat, which uses aggregated referral data from 1,500 global news and media sites. Musk knows this now, too: His November tweet saying Twitter was the “the biggest click driver on the internet by far” was widely mocked before being deleted.

When the return is so underwhelming, why bother paying? That money is better spent on funding reporters to report, not tweet.

Thursday’s planned shift could also mean higher costs for using tools that help newsrooms manage social media accounts, due to changes in how Twitter charges for developer access to its platform. Those going above a free plan of around 30 tweets a day will need to pay $100 per month for a still-limited plan, while other packages could run to many thousands of dollars per month.

“We’re approaching an inflection point with publishers questioning whether the scales have tipped,” says social media consultant Matt Navarra. “Once a couple of bigger outlets start leaving, I think we’ll start to see a few more, and it could snowball from there.”

This chimes with what some news organisations have been stating publicly. NPR, which has paused tweeting on the platform from official accounts due to Musk’s incorrect labeling of it as “state-affiliated media” and then “government-funded media,” said a mere 2 percent of its web referrals came via Twitter. And NPR is no minnow: Its official accounts have a combined 17.6 million followers, according to a Nieman Lab tally.

Meanwhile, Twitter, by its own measures, benefits hugely from having reputable news organisations of all sizes on the platform. “Newsrooms and journalists have always been the lifeblood of this place,” tweeted Lara Cohen, formerly Twitter’s head of marketing and partnerships.

In September, the company published a blog post with the headline: “How many people come to Twitter for news? As it turns out, a LOT.” It detailed, using independent studies plus its own internal data, that 94 percent of its users were interested in news and current affairs, with three in four people coming to the platform at least once a day to consume news content. There were more than 10.4 billion tweets about global news in the first six months of 2022. And a majority of users had followed accounts of US national news outlets, local news outlets, international news outlets or individual journalists.

In other words, most people on Twitter find value in what the media does. The obvious exception is Musk himself. His actions toward the media range from the petty, such as auto-responding to press requests with the “poop” emoji, to the oppressive, banning journalists on farcical “security” grounds and blocking links to newsletter platform Substack.

Musk, though, is a troll. And while he is free to say what he likes, self-respect and basic business sense demand media organisations do not play his game. If the first rule of the internet is “do not feed the trolls,” then it certainly seems unwise to start paying them.

Dave Lee is Bloomberg Opinion's US technology columnist. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.

Credit: Bloomberg