(Washington) The official account of the American daily New York Times no longer had the golden mark 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 symbol pay certification.
However, the brand was still present on the official accounts of the newspaper’s “world”, “travel” and even “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 platform’s owner, Elon Musk, who compared the information posted there to “propaganda, not even interesting” and his news feed 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.
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.
Asked by AFP, a spokesperson for the New York Times confirmed that the newspaper still does not intend to “pay to maintain the certification of our official accounts” and will not reimburse its journalists who wish 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 the basketball player LeBron James, have not seen their blue mark, or gold, 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. It was courted by accounts that wanted to be certified, allowing the platform to become a safe forum for celebrities, politicians, organizations and journalists.
According to Travis Brown, a software developer who also specializes in social media monitoring, more than 60,000 individuals or entities had chosen as of Sunday morning to pay to obtain or maintain their certification. However, he pointed out, these are mostly “small accounts, very few of which had prior certification.”
