The social media platform will lose its “magic” if it starts charging $8 per month for a Twitter blue tick and other perks, according to a former executive.

According to the platform’s former global communications director Brandon Borrman, all users currently had an equal voice there.

Twitter would “stratify” if verification and visibility were sold. He was “curious and worried” about what Elon Musk, the platform’s new owner, might do to increase sales.

“If charging for the blue tick was the fairest way to do it, I think Twitter probably would have done it a while ago,” Borrman told BBC News.

He also questioned Twitter’s ability to defend charging users to maintain a “equal playing field” with other users. In addition to receiving the blue Verified badge, Musk has suggested that those who pay might have their tweets promoted more widely and see fewer advertisements.

“It’s great for people who have money and want to spend money on having their voice amplified,” Brandon Borrman said. “$8 might seem like nothing to a lot of people – but it’s quite substantial for most people around the world.”

We must find a way to pay the bills, Musk tweeted in reference to his strategy.

Celebrities, politicians, and world leaders express their opinions on Twitter, which is regarded as influential, and regular people can reply to them there. But despite having a core user base of about 300 million people per month, the business has not turned a profit in a number of years.

Borrman acknowledged that for it to advance, it had to change. Its main issue, according to him, was that many people who tried it left.

“You have to convince them that they’ll get something out of it that they don’t already by seeing tweets embedded in newspapers and television coverage all over the world.”

Threats to delete accounts have been made by some Twitter users in opposition to the new administration. Borrman, however, claimed that despite smaller rival Mastadon’s assertion that thousands of new accounts had been created since Musk’s acquisition, there was still no reliable substitute.

“They’re just not consumer or user friendly,” he said.

Jack Dorsey, the creator of Twitter, is working on a social network idea called Bluesky, but it’s unclear when it will launch or what it will look like.

In addition, Dorsey has kept his approximately $1 billion stake in Twitter. Dorsey has supported Musk, calling him “the singular solution I trust” to lead the company.

Borrman, who left Twitter in June 2021 after three and a half years and is now employed by the non-profit web organization Mozilla, expressed his gratitude for leaving the company before Elon Musk took over.

He said he was still in touch with company friends and coworkers and that things were now “tense” at the corporate headquarters.

“Elon obviously has a particular way he likes to manage and approach things that’s quite different from the way Twitter has been managed in the past,” he said.

“There’s a lot of people who are in ‘wait-and-see’ mode.”

Unverified reports claim Musk is thinking about firing thousands of employees.

Thanks to a Silicon Valley mentality of luring and keeping technology talent, Borrman said that Twitter was one of many businesses that were “probably bigger than they need to be right now.”

“Tech moves in cycles that are radically different than oil and gas, automotive, other forms of manufacturing, so having that staff on hand can actually be very beneficial to you and accelerating your growth,” he said.

“Twitter was in a pretty good position going into 2022. I was really excited to see what that team was going to do going forward. It’s disappointing that they weren’t able to actually execute on what I think for was a pretty solid strategy.”

(Adapted from BBC.com)

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