Elon Musk and Twitter are in further turmoil as high-profile employees quit and the rules for verified accounts keep changing.
People on and off the platform have raised concerns about the direction Twitter is taking under its new billionaire leader.
And the gray “official” badges came back less than two days after they were removed.
Some users report that the Twitter Blue subscription sign-up option disappeared a day after launch.
Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission said it was monitoring events with “deep concern.”
In his first few weeks as CEO, Mr Musk laid off around 3,700 employees – but hadn’t spoken to the majority of those remaining at Twitter.
His first email to employees warned, “The road ahead is arduous and requires intense work to succeed.”
“Without significant subscription revenue, there’s a good chance Twitter won’t survive the upcoming economic downturn,” he said.
A number of key executives subsequently resigned from the platform.
“I have made the difficult decision to leave Twitter,” tweeted Chief Security Officer Lea Kissner, who has reportedly resigned with other key privacy or security executives.
Yoel Roth, the site’s head of trust and security, then resigned just a day after strongly defending Mr Musk’s content moderation policy to advertisers.
Late Thursday, Mr Roth’s Twitter bio described him as a “former Head of Trust & Safety at @Twitter”.
Mr. Roth had become the public face of Twitter’s content moderation following Mr. Musk’s acquisition.
Mr Musk had praised him for defending Twitter’s ongoing efforts to combat harmful misinformation and hate speech.
I’ve heard Twitter in its current state being described as an airplane in mid-flight without a pilot.
The sudden departure of the head of trust and security, the chief information security officer and the two chief privacy and compliance officers is a dramatic development. It’s not clear how quickly they will be replaced while the company remains so unstable and sweeping job cuts have already taken place.
From a security perspective, like all major platforms, Twitter will be a constant target for hackers and bad actors around the world, meaning it cannot afford to turn the ball around and it must continue to ensure its systems are robust, and threats are monitored.
As for user privacy, I don’t need to tell you how important it is. And indeed, as we have seen, US regulators are already watching what is happening very closely.
Elon Musk, on the other hand, says engagement and user counts are higher than ever. We have only his word for it – I have to say that anecdotally I see many Twitter Blue subscribers who seem happy with their new “blue tick”. And as many as there are, these are all fresh earnings that the company didn’t have before.
But it also causes its own headache, because now anyone can have a badge that until recently was a symbol of authenticity – including fakes.
Musk has also said bankruptcy isn’t out of the question. While it may feel like we’re watching Twitter hurtle towards the edge of a cliff, I think it’s too early to tell if it’ll manage to hit the brakes in time. In the early days of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg’s motto was “move fast and break things” – Elon Musk seems to have taken this to another level.
The Twitter Blue subscription service allowed users to pay £6.99 ($7.99) per month for a blue tick. There would be a separate gray “official” badge for some high profile accounts.
But on Wednesday, Musk scrapped the new gray tick almost immediately, adding to the confusion.
On Friday, however, new gray official badges for large organizations reappeared on some Twitter profiles.
Fake accounts have also surfaced posing as celebrities and politicians such as NBA star LeBron James and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
US-based PR strategist Max Burns said he’s seen fake accounts with the verified blue tick purchased through Twitter Blue posing as real airline support accounts and customers trying to connect to them on Twitter contact, asked to contact the fake accounts instead.
“How long does it take for a prankster to take a real passenger’s ticket information and cancel their flight? Or take his credit card info and go on a shopping spree?” he said.
“It only takes one major incident for any airline to use Twitter as a source of customer engagement.”
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