Is Twitter pay-to-play now? Early results of my Blue checkmark experiment are in | ZDNET

Photo by STR/NurPhoto via Getty ImagesAccording to the Pew Research Center, roughly 60% of Twitter users report taking a break from Twitter in the last year. Unfortunately, Pew doesn’t compare those numbers to previous years, but the implication is that Twitter’s changes have caused defections from the service.There is almost a biblical analogy here, in that the population of Twitter have scattered across many different services, not one of which has the same mass and strength as the original home.Also: I’ve used social networks since the 80s. Threads is the most annoying one I’ve triedMy concern is about Twitter, where I still have a considerable audience of followers. From February through May 2023, I saw a precipitous decline in overall engagement with my readers. A big part of that decline was probably caused by a change in how Twitter promotes tweets to its users. According to a tweet from the company on March 27, only those with verified “blue checkmark” accounts will have their tweets show in the For You section of the Twitter feed. That’s the only place most people look.Does the blue checkmark perform?Last month, I decided to pay for the Twitter Blue. Doing so was supposed to put
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