New York Times stripped of verification tick on Twitter after refusing to pay Elon Musk’s new fee

The New York Times Twitter account was stripped of its ‘verified’ status on Sunday, days after the newspaper announced it would not pay the $1,000 a month fee that Twitter CEO Elon Musk began charging for the coveted check mark.

As of Sunday morning, the New York Times Twitter account, which boasts 55 million followers, appeared without a checkmark next to its name for the first time in years after the new checkmark was implemented. based on rates at the end of the day Saturday.

Under the new system, individual users will have to pay $8 per month for a verified blue check, while businesses must pay the $1,000 fee in exchange for a verified gold check.

In addition to The Times, numerous news outlets including Politico, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and Buzzfeed announced that they would not pay the fee and would not reimburse reporters who chose to pay for a check mark.

Musk seemed to have taken a keen interest in The New York Times’ refusal, yet on Sunday morning his account was one of the few to lose its checkmark after Musk joked about revoking it Saturday night. Since then, the Wall Street Journal has also lost its check mark.

He also said that The Times was “being incredibly hypocritical” by refusing to pay while asking its readers for their own subscription fees.

Twitter CEO Elon Musk said The New York Times was “being incredibly hypocritical” by refusing to pay while asking its readers for their own subscription fees.

In late March, Twitter announced that it would be “retiring” its old checkmark system effective April 1, and that businesses and individuals hoping to verify their accounts would have to fork over the new fees.

Last Thursday, The New York Times announced its plans to not pay for the verified checkmark, and only to do so for its journalists “in exceptional cases when necessary for reporting.”

The Washington Post responded in tune with The Times, telling CNN’s Oliver Darcy that “clearly verified check marks no longer represent authority or expertise.”

Management at the LA Times circulated a similar sentiment in an internal memo sent to employees, according to Darcy.

“First, verification no longer establishes authority or credibility,” wrote a managing editor for the LA Times. “Instead, it just means someone paid for a subscription to Twitter Blue.”

“Second, while Twitter is still an important newsgathering tool, it’s not as reliable as it used to be. We also won’t pay to verify our organization on Twitter. It’s still unclear if there’s any real value in doing so, beyond identifying all of us as LA Times employees.

Just after midnight on Saturday, Musk responded to a Twitter user mocking The Times’ decision not to cash the check, replying, “Oh okay, we’ll take it down then.” Soon after, the post checkmark disappeared.

Hours later, Musk tweeted that the newspaper was “propaganda.”

‘The real tragedy of [The New York Times] it’s that their propaganda isn’t even interesting,’ Musk wrote early Sunday morning.

“Plus, your feed is the Twitter equivalent of diarrhea. It is unreadable,” she added.

The New York Times said Thursday that it would not pay for verification of its Twitter account.

Several prominent figures have come out since the Twitter announcement to say they would not pay the verification fee.

Basketball player LeBron James said Friday that he would not pay the $8 fee. He tweeted: “Well I guess my blue tick will be gone soon because if you know me I won’t pay the five.”

James incorrectly thought it would cost him five dollars, but in reality the price is eight, and the feature, which is called ‘Twitter Blue’, is already available to users who are willing to pay for it.

Others, including Chrissy Teigen, Dionne Warwick and rapper Ice-T, also suggested they wouldn’t pay for the feature.

Last week, Musk overtook Barack Obama as the most followed Twitter user, with 133.08 million followers compared to Obama’s 133.04 million.

That came after reports that Twitter’s CEO ordered the company’s engineers to program the algorithm to “boost” his tweets.