Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and is also most known as one of the founders and CEO of Tesla, has recently bought Twitter.

Twitter users were shocked when he began the process of purchasing the extremely popular social media platform — no one expected what would come next.

Seven months later, the purchase was finalized Oct. 27 of this year. Things have changed radically since then.

Musk’s first plan of action was to fire and lay off nearly half of its workforce, causing a lot of backlash towards him due to the manner in which it was done. Then, on Nov. 9, people ran to Twitter as a result of a brand new subscription service premiering on the app. Twitter Blue, a tool that can instantly create a verified account on the platform was released, and it’s $8 a month.

However, many have been against this decision and new practice on Twitter.

Kayla Oden, student in DGS, said that she thinks Twitter Blue defeats the purpose of verification and takes away the value of the checkmark.

“If anyone can do it, then how do you know if the account is actually who they say they are?” Oden said.

Twitter blue caused a lot of issues with impersonation and due to his campaign of free speech, it also caused those imposter accounts to post a lot of controversial topics under other company, brand or influencer names.

Luckily, once identified as imposters, the accounts were banned. However, not all Twitter users abused this new feature, some used it to build up their own brand or businesses.

Luis Dianexis, business owner who has been verified on Twitter since Musk took over, is one of those people. 

“There is a wide variety of folks that paid for their verification and suddenly saw themselves as better than the rest of non-verified twitter,” Dianexis said. “But I wanted to see what it would do for my profile to advertise my business. I gained 1,000 followers in the few days after and noticed my posts had a lot more engagement.”

Dianexis explained that on Twitter, businesses are rarely verified, therefore a feature like Twitter Blue can help out small business owners gain better support from social media.

“I know people with 10 times the follower count that I have, that run very high profile (and) public business, get nowhere trying to get their legitimate Twitter check mark,” Dianexis said. “You either get denied right away or go weeks not hearing a thing.”

Despite all of the public hate on the idea, being able to buy verification status with a subscription is the only option for some. In the past, it has seemed like verification status was slated towards celebrities, high profile influencers and national brands. However, this can now be offered to a larger group of people. 

Twitter Blue’s release had its ups and downs and is now currently unavailable to the public because of the overflow of impersonation accounts.

If you had previously been subscribed, you would maintain your subscription, but as of right now, Twitter Blue is still suspended. They originally set the relaunch for Nov. 29, but within a few days of that deadline, Musk announced that they would be pushing it back once again.

Will Musk ever actually reinstate Twitter Blue? Currently, users are unsure if they’ll ever get a chance to get a verification check mark again.

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