After much controversy surrounding the new owner’s flagship project, Elon Musk announced on Tuesday, November 15, that the launch of a new paid subscription to Twitter has been postponed. “Blue Verified’s relaunch postponed to November 29 to ensure it is concrete”tweeted the general manager of the social network.

Before Tesla’s boss took over Twitter on October 27, the platform offered, on the one hand, a free identity verification service for organizations and notorious people, and on the other, a paid subscription to additional options. Twitter is blue.

Elon Musk has introduced a redesign of this subscription to add authenticity so that all users, regardless of their notoriety, can get it for $8 a month.

The new Twitter Blue was activated a week ago on iPhones, days after the company laid off nearly half of its 7,500 employees.

For forty-eight hours, several accounts were able to impersonate celebrities or large companies, from LeBron James to Nintendo. Pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly was forced to apologize on Thursday after a tweet issued with an account in its name went viral with a blue checkmark offering free insulin.

“Cheating Issues”

On Friday, the option to subscribe to Twitter Blue disappeared, and an internal memo published by some American media explained that the service had been suspended. “To solve problems of abuse”.

In the system starting on November 29 “Any name change will lose the blue tick until the name is confirmed via Twitter”, Mr. Musk promised on Tuesday. He also said that people who don’t subscribe will lose their Blue Tick (if they were getting it for free) in the coming months.

In parallel, the social network released a new “official” gray badge for notorious accounts on November 9. Earlier in the day, Elon Musk ordered the removal of this new label, before director of development products Esther Crawford stepped in to explain that the badge would initially be reserved for governments and organizations.

The layoffs continued this week amid tumultuous Twitter. Elon Musk thanked an engineer with a tweet after publicly questioning the claims of the eccentric leader who considers himself the ultimate defender of free speech.