The official account of the American daily New York Times no longer had the golden brand reserved on Twitter for businesses on Sunday, after a tweet from Elon Musk accusing it of “propaganda” while the social network wants to make this certification symbol pay. The brand was however still present on the official accounts of the newspaper’s “world”, “travel” or “opinions” pages, noted an AFP journalist.
The daily’s official account has nearly 55 million subscribers. The disappearance of the certification from the New York Times account comes after two tweets from the owner of the microblogging platform, Elon Musk, who compared the information posted there to “propaganda, not even interesting” and his thread. news to “the Twitter equivalent of diarrhea, unreadable”.
The end of the certification of the official account of this American daily also comes the day after the launch of the new certification program of the platform, which will now only be granted to people or organizations paying to obtain it. Twitter plans to charge eight dollars a month for certification for an individual, eleven dollars through Apple’s app store and up to $1,000 for a business.
If, concretely, this did not mean that the accounts already certified saw their specific brand disappear on Saturday, the new certified accounts are those who will have chosen the Twitter Blue subscription. Questioned by AFP, a spokesman for the New York Times confirmed that this newspaper still did not intend to “pay to maintain the certification of our official accounts” and would not reimburse its journalists who would like to do so for their own account outside cases “where it remains essential to the work” of the latter.
For the time being, no other American or foreign media, nor any of the personalities who announced that they would also not pay to maintain the certification of their account, like basketball player LeBron James, have seen their blue mark , or golden, disappear from their account.
This blue notch, affixed next to the name of the profile, has nevertheless become, since its creation in 2009, one of the essential marks on Twitter. She was courted by accounts that wanted to be certified, allowing the platform to become a safe forum for stars, politicians, organizations and journalists.
