Elon Musk created the Twitter official account badge, then promptly kills it

In just under 24 hours, Elon Musk kills his first full feature on Twitter. The Official Account Badge was up yesterday for a limited number of accounts.

The word Official would be shown on the accounts that had been verified by Twitter staff, as being who they claim to be. This to replace the Twitter Blue check mark that had previously been the way the social media platform verified its accounts.

There was speculation as to how the account verification process would work, in light of everyone being able to impersonate any account by purchasing a Twitter Blue check mark.

As of 10 a.m. EST, Elon Musk did not have an official badge, neither did SpaceX, nor Tesla. But, HBO, and several athletes did have the official badge.

The idea behind the badge was to make up for all the impersonated accounts, that had the original TwitterBlue account verification that was available to anyone who wanted to pay $8 for it.

All the TwitterBlue accounts showing up suddenly caused confusion. There was a great deal of back pedaling by the original blue check account holders as they tried to Tweet out the names of fake accounts that were impersonating them.

If the open sale of TwitterBlue was meant to confound the political landscape on Twitter, the results weren't a great deal as expected.

The new official account badge was meant to alleviate the pressure Musk was under to come up with some type of system of verification.

The change had arrived yesterday morning, when people found out they had the word Official below the original TwitterBlue check mark. Ester Crawford, a Twitter early-stage product manager attempted to explain the feature ahead of Roll Out.

“A lot of folks have asked about how you'll be able to distinguish between @TwitterBlue subscribers with blue checkmarks and accounts that are verified as official, which is why we’re introducing the “Official" label to select accounts when we launch,” she said in a tweet.

Today, the word Official is gone from the accounts that had them. Musk, like other chaos making leaders, ended the Official badge feature in a Tweet. In just under 24 hours Musk had killed the first feature his new tenure at Twitter had developed.

Other signs of a mass exodus of advertisers, is Musk blocking advertiser accounts that are asking questions about his intentions. The Chaos has become common at the social media giant, with Musk firing almost half his staff, including all moderators, then by the day's end asking some to return, and giving them just an hour to answer.

Twitter as a company is losing $4 million per day, and Musk has to make that up, before he can even start paying out the enormous sum he floated in loans from places like Saudi Arabia and onshore Banks. He needs to make money, fast, and the only way to do that is to charge people a fee. It has to be done now, and include almost every account on the site.

The downside gets worse for the EV billionaire, there is little hope that he is able to charge all the accounts, especially when a whopping 4% are fake, or robot accounts, who just reply to accounts that disagree with the original owners' politics.

Some of the people involved with Musk have warned him that millions of accounts are fake, duplicated, or just multiple accounts owned by one person, who can't be charged for more than one account.

The end result of this testing of the waters for an official badge ended with just a Tweet that simply said "I killed it," followed by the cryptic "Blue check will be the great leveler."

What this actually means for the users on Twitter is anyone's guess. It a sure bet, there will be more chaos, more people leaving, and more people looking to return after the waters around the Twitter landscape calm down some.

Twitter’s new ‘Official’ verification badge is now live on select accounts pic.twitter.com/7wmuywIgdp

— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) November 9, 2022

Twitter’s new ‘Official’ verification badge is now live on select accounts pic.twitter.com/7wmuywIgdp

— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) November 9, 2022