Twitter users may have to pay monthly fee to keep their verified tags

Just days after ‘Chief Twit’ Elon Musk took over Twitter, the social media giant is reportedly introducing a new plan to charge users a monthly fee of about $20 to retain their verification tags.The social media company is working out plans to change its $5 a month subscription service Twitter Blue into a more expensive one that also verifies users, The Verge reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.Under the new plan, Twitter could charge up to $20 for Twitter Blue with its verification feature.’The whole verification process is being revamped right now,’ Twitter’s new boss Mr Musk tweeted on Monday, replying to a user on the microblogging platform.Twitter’s executives reportedly spent the weekend discussing changes to the social media platform.Users may have to pay to subscribe to Twitter Blue or lose their badges, Casey Newton, a former editor for The Verge reported in his newsletter Platformer, citing sources close to the matter.The subscription service, launched last year, currently costs $4.99, and is only available in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and offers users a slew of new features such as the ability to undo or bookmark tweets as well as a ‘reader mode’ to view long threads of posts.Twitter Blue, along with the verification tag for its users, may cost as much as $19.99 per month, according to the report.The social media company did not immediately respond to The Independent’s request for comment.Merely three days after taking over Twitter, Mr Musk has made several changes to the company, firing three of its top executives, including chief executive Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal and Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s head of legal policy, trust and safety.Since his takeover, Twitter has made changes to the platform’s homepage for logged-out users and the Tesla chief has also pitched to investors to cut Twitter’s reliance on advertising revenue.On becoming the company’s new owner, Mr Musk described it as an asset with ‘incredible potential’ that has ‘sort of languished for a long time’.’The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence,’ the Tesla titan tweeted. ‘There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society,’ he said.Some reports have also expressed concern following Mr Musk’s statements about free speech and open debate on the platform, that there be cuts to Twitter’s content moderation.On Friday, he tweeted that major content decisions or account reinstatements would not happen before a new ‘content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints’ convened.A New York Times report also suggested that Mr Musk was planning mass layoffs at the company, including of managers and engineers who haven’t recently contributed to the platform’s code base.The ‘Chief Twit’, however, rubbished the report on Monday, calling it ‘false’ but had earlier told prospective investors in his deal to buy Twitter that he intended to reduce the company’s staff from around 7,500 down to just over 2,000.