Twitter owner Elon Musk made fun of The New York Times on Sunday after the newspaper refused to pay $1,000 a month to verify itself.
"The real tragedy," Musk said of The Times, "is that their propaganda isn't even interesting.
"Also, their feed is the Twitter equivalent of diarrhea. It's unreadable. They would have far more real followers if they only posted their top articles. Same applies to all publications."
Last month, Twitter announced that on "April 1st" the company would "begin winding down" its "legacy verified program and removing legacy verified checkmarks." A blog post on Twitter's help section indicated that "verified organizations" or those with a gold or gray checkmark would have to pay "$1,000/month" plus "$50/month" for anyone wishing to add the organization's logo next to their personal profile.
"A spokesperson for The Times said in a statement the company doesn't plan to pay the monthly fee to keep check marks on any of its institutional Twitter accounts and that it wouldn't reimburse reporters who want to keep check marks on their personal accounts 'except in rare instances where this status would be essential for reporting purposes,'" NBC News reported on Sunday.
The Times reported on Friday that Twitter "plans to charge organizations $1,000 a month to be verified, but will make exceptions for its top 500 advertisers and for the 10,000 most-followed organizations that have been previously verified, according to an internal document seen by The Times."
Newsmax reached out to Twitter to verify this document. The Times has 55 million followers.
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