The billionaire owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, announced Tuesday that he is once again postponing the controversial verification of users through a payment system, this time without offering a specific date on which the service will be available.
“We are pausing the relaunch of Verifica Azul until we have a high degree of confidence that we can stop the fake identities. We will probably use different color marks for organizations and for individuals, ”Musk wrote on his online account.
In mid-November, Musk had promised that the payment verification service would be available again from November 29, something that ultimately will not happen.
On November 11, Twitter stopped access to its Blue payment service, which had given subscribers the blue verified user symbol a few days earlier, and restored the “official” brand to distinguish some accounts from possible impostors.
The social network thus gave a new lurch to try to deal with the chaos generated by the latest decisions of its new owner, which had led to a proliferation of users posing as personalities or companies.
The option to pay $8 a month to have access to the verified account symbol, which until then had distinguished relevant profiles whose identity was confirmed, triggered the confusion, making it easier for users to impersonate others as a joke or for fraudulent purposes.
Companies like Nintendo, the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly or Tesla itself, which Musk runs, saw how users armed with the blue verification “tick” posed as them for hours, until their accounts were suspended.