Twitter is working on a new feature dubbed “Paywalled Video,” which would allow users to charge money for access to videos, according to a new report from the Washington Post. And while the Post waits eight paragraphs to state the obvious, using the kind of euphemisms you’d expect in a respectable newspaper, Gizmodo can afford to be more blunt. It’s for porn. People on Twitter are going to charge for porn.
“When a creator composes a tweet with a video, the creator can enable the paywall once a video has been added to the tweet,” an internal email about the new feature explains, according to the Post.
Interestingly, the prices are preset, with creators allowed to charge $1, $2, $5, or $10 for access to the video, with Twitter taking a cut of the payment using Stripe. The feature, which would put Twitter more directly in competition with sites like OnlyFans, is scheduled to be rolled out in as little as two weeks, according to the Post, though it’s not clear if Paywalled Video was in the works before Elon Musk finalized his purchase of Twitter last week.
Musk has been very publicly trying to figure out ways to squeeze money out of Twitter, with most attention being paid to a new subscription model for verification, which Musk recently tweeted would cost $8. But Twitter currently relies on advertising as its primary source of revenue, despite the fact that existing advertisers have become increasingly nervous about Musk’s plans for the site.
Musk wants Twitter to be the proverbial “town square,” and has called himself a free speech absolutist, suggesting that users that have been previously banned—like former President Donald Trump or conspiracy theorist Alex Jones—could soon be allowed back on the site. But any move to push out normal people and allow neo-fascists like Trump to become the dominant voice on the platform would be bad for business, as anyone who’s watched the commercials on Fox News can tell you—it’s little more than advertising for the elderly and doomsday preppers at this point.
But Musk tweeted early Wednesday that he was still working on a process for getting previously banned accounts back on Twitter.
“Twitter will not allow anyone who was de-platformed for violating Twitter rules back on platform until we have a clear process for doing so, which will take at least a few more weeks,” Musk tweeted.
Pornographic material is currently allowed on Twitter, something that makes it an outlier compared with other social media sites like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. But so-called sensitive media on Twitter is blurred by default, and it remains to be seen whether mainstream advertisers will become even more nervous about the kind of content that’s permitted on Twitter if Paywalled Video actually launches.
The other obvious issue with charging for video is that it could become a moderation nightmare from a copyright perspective. Many of the videos that currently circulate on Twitter are allowed under the “fair use” provision of U.S. copyright law, which permits a limited portion of a copyrighted work to be shared for the purposes of commentary. Copyright holders who believe too much of a given work is being shared can file a DMCA request with Twitter to get material taken down. But if the material is behind a paywall, it would likely become harder for copyright holders to know when their work is being used without authorization in a way that’s not considered fair use.
While Musk is considered a genius by some gullible corners of the world, if only because he’s so tremendously wealthy, recent comments from the billionaire on Twitter betray a fundamental lack of understanding about how the world works. As just one example, Musk recently replied to a hedge fund “futurist,” Brett Winton, who tweeted, “Lords have been knighted by the twitter verification wand are upset that the proles will be able to buy status.” Musk sent a “bullseye” emoji.
But that’s a complete misunderstanding of the purpose behind verification, at least as it’s commonly understood by users. The idea behind verification was that bad actors trying to impersonate people would have a harder time. If anyone with $8 can buy verification, it doesn’t actually provide a layer of trust in the system. It just allows bad actors to pay $8 to impersonate anyone they please.
In fact, once Twitter starts charging for verification, it will still serve a useful purpose. Users will be able to tell which people on the platform are status-obsessed chumps with $8 to spare.